Legendary Early Chola Kings - Chola Empire

Chola Empire

The genealogy of the Chola empire as found in the Tamil literature and in the many inscriptions left by the later Chola kings contains a number of kings recorded for whom there is no verifiable historic evidence. There are as many versions of this lineage as there are sources for them. The main sources are (a) the Sangam literature – particularly Purananuru, religious literature such as Periapuranam, semi-biographical poems of the later Chola period such as the Kalingathuparani written during the Kulothunga Chola I and in the temple and cave inscription and copper-plate grants left by medieval Cholas.

Irrespective of the source, no list of the kings has a high level of historic fact and, while they generally are similar to each other, no two lists are exactly the same. Modern historians consider these lists not as historically reliable sources but as comprehensive conglomerations of various Hindu deities and Puranic characters attributed to local chieftains and invented ancestry of the Cholas of the Vijayalaya dynasty attempting to re-establish their legitimacy and supremacy in a land they were trying to conquer.