Early Cholas

The three crowned kings

Sangam literature describes a Tamil country divided among three ruling houses — Cōḻa, Cēra and Pāṇṭiya, the muventar or three crowned kings — with many smaller chieftains between them. Aśoka's second and thirteenth rock edicts name the Coḍas, Pāṇḍyas, Satiyaputras and Keralaputras as peoples beyond his southern frontier, which independently confirms that these polities existed by the third century BCE.

The Cholas held the Kaveri delta, the richest agricultural land in the peninsula. Their inland seat was Uraiyūr, near modern Tiruchirappalli, and their port was Puhār at the river's mouth, described in the Paṭṭiṉappālai as a town of warehouses, customs officers and foreign merchants.

Karikāla

The most celebrated of the early Chola kings is Karikāla, credited in the poems with a victory at Veṇṇi that broke a confederacy of his rivals, and with building the embankments that made the Kaveri delta cultivable. The Grand Anicut across the Kaveri, still in use in a much-rebuilt form, is traditionally attributed to him; the attribution is old and plausible and cannot be documented.

Sangam poetry is the principal source and it is panegyric, composed by poets for patrons. It gives a vivid picture of courts, wars, ports and gift-giving, and almost no chronology; the ordering of kings and the absolute dates of the corpus are both long-running problems.

Eclipse and return

The early Chola line fades from the record after the third century CE, in the period the Tamil tradition associates with the Kalabhras. The dynasty returned in the ninth century under Vijayālaya, who took Tañjāvūr and founded the imperial line — a gap of some six hundred years across which the later Cholas nonetheless claimed unbroken descent, and their inscriptions carry elaborate genealogies to prove it.