page_title: Sangam literature
hierarchical_section_title: Sangam literature
caption_attribution_description: India, Bihar, Lakhi Sarai, South Asia The Maharishi (Great Sage) Agastya, 12th century Sculpture; Stone, Chloritoid phyllite, 26 3/4 x 14 1/4 x 4 3/4 in. (67.95 x 36.2 x 12.07 cm) Gift of the 2005 Collectors Committee (M.2005.30) Wikipedia Loves Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art This photo of item # M.2005.30 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was contributed under the team name "team_a" as part of the Wikipedia Loves Art project in February 2009. Los Angeles County Museum of Art The original photograph on Flickr was taken by howcheng—please add a comment to the original Flickr page whenever a use has been made on Wikipedia or another project. Project galleries on Flickr: this institution, this team
context_page_description: The Sangam literature, sometimes referred to as the Caṅkam literature or Koodal literature connotes the ancient Tamil literature and is the earliest known literature of South India. The Tamil tradition and legends link it to three literary gatherings around Madurai: the first over 4,440 years, the second over 3,700 years, and the third over 1,850 years before the start of the common era. Scholars consider this Tamil tradition-based chronology as ahistorical and mythical. Some of these scholars suggest the historical Sangam literature era spanned from c. 300-BCE to 300-CE while others variously place this early classical Tamil literature period a bit later and more narrowly but all before 300 CE. According to Kamil Zvelebil – a Tamil literature and history scholar, the most acceptable range for the Sangam literature is 100 BCE to 250 CE, based on the linguistic, prosodic and quasi-historic allusions within the texts and the colophons.
context_section_description: The Sangam literature, sometimes referred to as the Caṅkam literature or Koodal literature (Tamil: சங்க இலக்கியம், caṅka ilakkiyam) connotes the ancient Tamil literature and is the earliest known literature of South India. The Tamil tradition and legends link it to three literary gatherings around Madurai (Pandyan capital): the first over 4,440 years, the second over 3,700 years, and the third over 1,850 years before the start of the common era. Scholars consider this Tamil tradition-based chronology as ahistorical and mythical. Some of these scholars suggest the historical Sangam literature era spanned from c. 300-BCE to 300-CE  while others variously place this early classical Tamil literature period a bit later and more narrowly but all before 300 CE. According to Kamil Zvelebil – a Tamil literature and history scholar, the most acceptable range for the Sangam literature is 100 BCE to 250 CE, based on the linguistic, prosodic and quasi-historic allusions within the texts and the colophons.
  The Sangam literature had fallen into oblivion for much of the second millennium of the common era, but were preserved by and rediscovered in the monasteries of Hinduism, particularly those related to Shaivism near Kumbhakonam, by the colonial era scholars in late 19th century. The rediscovered Sangam classical collection is largely a bardic corpus. It comprises an Urtext of oldest surviving Tamil grammar (Tolkappiyam), the Ettuttokai anthology (the "Eight Collections"), the Pattuppattu anthology (the "Ten Songs"). The Tamil literature that followed the Sangam period – that is, after c. 250 CE but before c. 600 CE – is generally called the "post-Sangam" literature.
  This collection contains 2381 poems in Tamil composed by 473 poets, some 102 anonymous. Of these, 16 poets account for about 50% of the known Sangam literature, with Kapilar – the most prolific poet – alone contributing just little less than 10% of the entire corpus. These poems vary between 3 and 782 lines long. The bardic poetry of the Sangam era is largely about love (akam) and war (puram), with the exception of the shorter poems such as in paripaatal which is more religious and praise Vishnu, Shiva, Durga and Murugan.
  On their significance, Zvelebil quotes A. K. Ramanujan, "In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any Indian literature equal to these quiet and dramatic Tamil poems. In their values and stances, they represent a mature classical poetry: passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, austerity of line by richness of implication. These poems are not just the earliest evidence of the Tamil genius. The Tamils, in all their 2,000 years of literary effort, wrote nothing better."
caption: The Ancient Tamil Siddhar Agastyar is traditionally believed to have chaired the first Tamil Sangam in Madurai
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