Date of The Tolkappiyam

Date Of The Tolkappiyam

The dating of the earliest Tamil grammatical treatise Tolkappiyam has been debated much and it is still imprecise and uncertain and has seen wide disagreements amongst scholars in the field. It has been dated variously between 8000 BCE and 10th CE.

The antediluvian datings stemmed mostly from a descriptive commentary in an 8th century work called Iraiyanar AgapporuL, about the existence of three Tamil Academies; they have now been rejected as being devoid of any archeological/linguistic evidence. The disagreements now center around divergent dates from the third century BCE or later, with one estimate (by a botanist-author) being as late as 10th CE. Some scholars prefer to date it not as a single entity but in parts or layers which are estimated as written between the third century BCE and the fifth century CE. There is also no firm evidence to assign the authorship of this treatise to any one author.