Tamil

The Tamil are a Dravidian people of the southeastern Indian plain and northern Sri Lanka, their language bearing more than two thousand years of written history. In the Sangam age of roughly 300 BCE to 300 CE, Tamilakam was ruled by the Three Crowned Kings, Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas, ports trading with the Roman world across the Indian Ocean.

After a third-century interlude under the Kalabhras, the Pallavas and revived Pandyas restored order; from the ninth century Cholas built a Bay of Bengal empire, sent armies into Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, overawed Srivijaya with their navy, Pallava and Grantha scripts shaping those of Southeast Asia.

Fourteenth-century northwest invasions broke the ancient dynasties; Vijayanagara stepped in, its Madurai Nayaka governors making themselves independent kings in the early 1600s. Tamil rulers held northern Sri Lanka's Jaffna kingdom from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries; by the late eighteenth century most Tamil lands were inside the British Madras Presidency. Tamil culture sustained Bharatanatyam dance and temple bronze casting.