Some two thousand four hundred poems by well over four hundred poets, written in the Tamil country roughly two thousand years ago, about love and about war, and about almost nothing else. This page is the map: the age, the books, the rules the poets wrote by, and the world that shows through them.
"Sangam" (சங்கம், from Sanskrit saṅgha, an assembly) names an academy of poets said to have sat at Madurai under the Pandya kings. The poems themselves never use the word. What we have is the oldest surviving body of Tamil writing, and the oldest secular poetry in any Indian language.
A commentary on the Iraiyanar Akapporul (c. 8th century) tells of three academies. The first sat at a southern Madurai for 4,440 years and was swallowed by the sea; the second at Kapatapuram, also lost; the third at the present Madurai, where the surviving poems were made. Historians read this as a memory of a long tradition rather than a record — but the idea of a sea that took a Tamil homeland, Kumari Kandam, has had a long afterlife.
| Where | Lasted | Poets | Its grammar | What survives | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| First தலைச்சங்கம் | Then-Madurai, lost to the sea | 4,440 years | 549 | Agattiyam | Nothing |
| Middle இடைச்சங்கம் | Kapatapuram, lost to the sea | 3,700 years | 59 | Tolkappiyam | Tolkappiyam |
| Last கடைச்சங்கம் | Madurai | 1,850 years | 49 | — | The eighteen books |
The corpus is the Ettuthogai (எட்டுத்தொகை, "eight anthologies") — short poems by many hands, gathered by length and by subject — and the Pattupattu (பத்துப்பாட்டு, "ten songs"), ten long poems each by a single poet. Together, the Patinenmelkanakku, the "eighteen of the upper reckoning". The chart is drawn from this site's registry; hover a bar for the count.
நற்றிணை நல்ல குறுந்தொகை ஐங்குறுநூறு
ஒத்த பதிற்றுப்பத்து ஓங்கு பரிபாடல்
கற்றறிந்தார் ஏத்தும் கலியோடு அகம்புறம் என்று
இத்திறத்த எட்டுத் தொகை
Natrinai, good Kuruntokai, Ainkurunuru, matched Patirruppattu, lofty Paripadal, Kali that the learned praise, Akam and Puram — such are the eight anthologies.
Every poem is one or the other. Akam (அகம்) is love: no one is named, the speakers are types — the hero, the heroine, her friend, his bard — and the whole of nature is recruited to say what they feel. Puram (புறம்) is everything public: kings, war, generosity, death, and the poet's own life; here people and places are named, and the poems are our history.
Classified by thinai — the landscape that stands for a phase of love. Five are the proper ones; two more, kaikkilai (one-sided love) and perunthinai (mismatched love), sit outside them.
Also classified by thinai, but these are phases of war and public life, each with a flower the warriors wore. Tolkappiyam pairs them with the akam landscapes; the later Purapporul Venbamalai lists twelve.
| Thinai | Flower | The moment |
|---|---|---|
| வெட்சி Vetchi | Ixora | The cattle raid that opens a war |
| கரந்தை Karantai | Sphaeranthus | Recovering the cattle |
| வஞ்சி Vanchi | Indian willow | The march to invade |
| காஞ்சி Kanchi | Portia | Defence; the transience of life |
| உழிஞை Ulinai | Balloon vine | The siege of a fort |
| நொச்சி Nocchi | Chaste tree | Holding the fort |
| தும்பை Tumbai | Leucas | Pitched battle |
| வாகை Vakai | Sirissa | Victory |
| பாடாண் Padan | — | Praise of a king or patron |
| பொதுவியல் Potuviyal | — | General: elegy, advice, the memorial stone |
The tradition counts 473 poets. The colophons on this site, read off the six anthologies that carry them and spelt exactly as the source spells them, give 656 names — the surplus is mostly the same poet spelt two ways, which a later pass will merge. Some are kings, some are potters and smiths and merchants; at least thirty are women. A hundred and two poems are anonymous. Many poets are known only by a striking phrase from their one surviving poem: the poet of Kuruntokai 40 is Sempulappeyanirar, "the poet of the red earth and pouring rain".
The most prolific, with over 230 poems; friend and elegist of the chieftain Pari; master of kurinji. His Kurinjippattu explains the landscape to an outsider king.
Fifty-nine poems, most in Purananuru; court poet and envoy of Atiyaman, whom she mourned in some of the most direct elegies in the language.
Eighty-odd poems dense with historical allusion — kings, battles, places — which is why historians read him first.
Author of Tirumurukarruppadai and Nedunalvadai; the legend has him arguing grammar with Siva himself at the Madurai academy.
The marutham hundred of Ainkurunuru — a hundred short poems on the quarrels of the river country.
A woman poet of thirteen intense akam poems; tradition says she wandered in search of a husband who left her.
One poem — Purananuru 192, yathum ure yavarum kelir — and it is the one everyone knows.
Maduraikkanchi, 782 lines on the city of Madurai and its Pandya king — the longest of the ten songs and a walking tour of an ancient city.
Chera (சேரர்) in the west, with the bow; Chola (சோழர்) in the Kaveri delta, with the tiger; Pandya (பாண்டியர்) at Madurai, with the fish. Below them the velir chieftains — Pari, Ori, Kari, Ay, Atiyaman, Nalli, Pegan, the "seven patrons" (கடையெழு வள்ளல்கள்) whose generosity is the puram poets' constant theme.
Yavanas — Greeks and Romans — bring gold and wine and take pepper from the port of Muziris; their ships "churn the white foam of the Periyar". Puhar (Kaveripattinam) and Korkai, the pearl port, are described street by street. Roman coin hoards and the Periplus confirm it.
Murugan of the hills, Mayon (Vishnu) of the forest, Indra of the fields, Varunan of the shore, and Kotravai, the war-goddess of the waste. Worship is local and ecstatic — the veriyattu dance, offerings of millet and blood. Brahmins, Jains and Buddhists appear, but lightly.
A warrior who dies protecting cattle is given a nadukal, a standing stone with his name, garlanded and worshipped. Tolkappiyam gives the rite six stages. Hundreds of such stones survive; the poems describe them being raised.
Millet and hill rice, fish and salt, toddy and honey; the potter, the smith, the salt merchant's ox-cart, the bard's small lute (சீறியாழ்) and the dancing-girl (விறலி). The knowledge graph on this site indexes 1,483 of these things across the verses.
The poets are literate — they mention the stylus and the inscribed memorial — but the poems were composed for recitation and travelled by memory. What we read was copied onto palm leaf, and recopied, for eighteen centuries.
Tamil metre counts asai (metrical syllables) into sir (feet) into adi (lines), and asks that the second syllable of each line rhyme (etukai) and that lines begin alike (monai). Four metres carry nearly all of the corpus.
Four feet to a line, a spoken cadence — the "calling" metre. Almost all of the eight anthologies and the ten songs.
Tight and epigrammatic, ending on a short foot. The metre of Thirukkural and of most of the eighteen minor works.
Dramatic and musical, with refrains; used for dialogue. Kalittokai is entirely in it.
A song metre of varying length, set to named tunes. Only the anthology of that name uses it.
Composed for performance and carried by bards. Written on palm leaf with an iron stylus, the letters rubbed with lampblack. A leaf lasts two or three centuries in the Tamil climate; every text survived only by being copied again.
Between the 7th and 10th centuries the poems were gathered into the anthologies we have, each with a colophon naming the poet, the thinai and the turai. Medieval commentators — Nachchinarkkiniyar above all — glossed them.
By the eighteenth century the bhakti hymns and the epics were read; the Sangam poems were not. Tamil scholars trained on the later canon had, in many cases, never seen them.
In 1880 U. V. Swaminatha Iyer (உ. வே. சாமிநாதையர்) was shown a Civaka Cintamani manuscript by a civil servant and realised how much lay unprinted. He spent the next fifty years hunting manuscripts in monasteries and private houses and printing them: Pattupattu (1889), Purananuru (1894), and on. C. W. Damodaram Pillai printed Kalittokai (1887) and Tolkappiyam. Without them the corpus would be a rumour.
Every Sangam and post-Sangam text, with what is transcribed here.
Browse →Each thinai laid out as a map: land, season, god, people, birds, flowers, music.
Explore →Search the whole corpus, by Tamil or by English, by text or by landscape.
Search →Test what you now know — landscapes, loanwords, the Kural.
Play →In English: A. K. Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War (1985); George L. Hart, The Poems of Ancient Tamil (1975); Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan (1973); Vaidehi Herbert's complete translations at sangamtranslationsbyvaidehi.com, which this site's Sangam texts draw on.