Place · Pandya port city · India
Korkai
The ancient Pandyan port and pearl-fishing centre at Korkai on the Thamirabarani river mouth in Thoothukudi district, Tamil Nadu — the pre-eminent Tamil port of the Sangam period (3rd c. BCE to 3rd c. CE). Korkai is named in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st c. CE) as 'Kolkhoi', the capital of the southern Pandyas, and in Ptolemy's Geography (c.150 CE) as a major pearl-fishing centre. The pearls of the Tuticorin-Mannar coastal waters were a chief export to Rome through the port. Archaeological excavations by Y. Subbarayalu from 1968 and the Tamil Nadu Department of Archaeology from 2017 have uncovered an urban settlement with brick structures, Roman amphorae and black-and-red ware pottery. The port silted in the medieval period and the settlement shifted to Kayalpattinam.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 8.700, 78.050
Connections (3)
- Trade routeMantai
Korkai on the Tamil coast and Mantai on Lanka's northern tip faced each other across the Gulf of Mannar pearl banks, which both worked. The Periplus, Pliny and the Arab geographers all name the fishery, and the strait between them was the hinge on which Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea shipping turned without rounding the island.
- AnalogueKaveripattinam (Puhar)
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.
- AnalogueGuruvāyūr
Guruvayur and Korkai are the two ways a southern coastal place enters the record: one by a legend that moves an image fifteen hundred kilometres from Dvaraka and makes a Kerala temple part of a Gujarat story, the other by being named in a Greek sailing manual and having Roman coin in its levels. Textual transplant and excavated trade, on the same coastline.
On these journeys
- Iron Age & early historic south
- Indo-Roman & monsoon trade
- Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
- Indian port cities — the coast itself
- South India — the other landscapes
Sources
Wikipedia, “Korkai”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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