Place · Sangam-age Chola port · India
Kaveripattinam (Puhar)
Also known as Kaveripattinam, Poompuhar, Poompuhar / Kaveripattinam, Puhar
The Sangam-age Chola port on the Kaveri mouth in Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu, named extensively in the 2nd-century Tamil epic Silappadikaram as the capital of the early Cholas and the setting of the first part of the Kannagi story. Largely swallowed by sea-level change and silt from the 4th-5th centuries, Puhar's eroded and submerged ruins are now a site of coastal and underwater archaeology — K.V. Soundara Rajan's ASI excavations from 1962 and the Marine Archaeology Centre's 1991 surveys documented submerged brick structures 2-5 metres below the water. The town's historical reality was long debated and is now archaeologically grounded, though much of the material lies offshore.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 11.145, 79.850
Connections (6)
- Port forNagapattinam
Kaveripattinam was the Sangam-age port at the Kaveri mouth and Nagapattinam the medieval Chola one a little to its south — the harbour moved as the delta silted, which is what happens to every port on this coast. Rajendra's fleets for Sri Lanka and Srivijaya sailed from these Coromandel roads, and Nagapattinam also held a Buddhist vihara endowed by a Srivijayan king, which is the other half of the same relationship.
- Maritime routeQuanzhou
The Quanzhou inscription of 1281, in Tamil and Chinese, records a Śiva temple built in a Chinese port by a Tamil merchant with the Yuan emperor's sanction, and some three hundred carved stones from it survive in the city. It is the furthest east an Indian temple inscription has been found, and it belongs to the same Tamil merchant-guild network — the Ayyavole and Manigramam — that ran the Bay of Bengal trade out of Kaveripattinam and Nagapattinam.
- Trade routeWootz steel region, Telangana
Crucible steel was made in the Telangana and Tamil country from at least the early centuries CE and shipped as cakes through the Coromandel ports, where Arab and Persian merchants bought it and West Asian smiths forged it into the blades Europe called Damascus. The watered pattern comes from carbide banding in the crucible melt. The process had been lost by the nineteenth century and metallurgists are still reconstructing it from the archaeology.
- Site adjacencyArikamedu
Arikamedu and Kaveripattinam are sixty kilometres apart on the Coromandel and are the two ends of the same problem: one is a well-excavated Indo-Roman station with stratified Mediterranean pottery, the other a Sangam-poem port largely eroded into the sea. Between them they show why the Tamil evidence is literary in one place and archaeological in the other.
- Maritime routeMantai
Mantai and Puhar face each other across the Palk Strait, which is shallow enough that large vessels could not pass and cargo was carried overland across the Jaffna isthmus instead. That portage is why both towns existed, why the pearl banks between them were contested for two thousand years, and why the Cholas eventually took the whole northern coast of the island.
- AnalogueKorkai
Korkai has been left inland by a coast that built seaward; Puhar has been taken by a coast that eroded. The two Tamil ports illustrate the two opposite processes on one peninsula within three hundred kilometres, and they are why the Sangam poems' harbours are sometimes under a village and sometimes under the sea.
On these journeys
- Iron Age & early historic south
- Indo-Roman & monsoon trade
- Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
- Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
- The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
- Indian port cities — the coast itself
Sources
Sangam literature; Poompuhar excavation reports
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