Off Poompuhar, a West Asian Jar Cross-Examines Sangam Poetry

The

Sea as Witness: What One Jar Can and Cannot Prove About Puhar In 1945, Mortimer Wheeler excavated at Arikamedu near Puducherry and found Mediterranean pottery in the soil. That find did something Tamil scholarship had long wanted: it gave the Yavanas of Sangam poetry a physical address.

In 1981, the National Institute of Oceanography and the Tamil Nadu archaeology department carried out the first offshore survey off Poompuhar, hoping the sea would do for Puhar what the soil had done for Arikamedu. This week's announcement is the latest round of the same exercise.

The literature makes a claim and archaeology is asked to confirm it.

What the Seabed Has Given In the

third phase of the state's underwater exploration, divers recovered fragments from 10-12 metres of water, about 1.8 to 2.2 km off the present shore. Among them are pieces of a torpedo jar, a West Asian transport vessel associated with long-distance Indian Ocean trade.

The divers also found foreign and local pottery, ring wells 60-65 cm across and structures embedded in the seabed. The State Department of Archaeology and the Indian Maritime University aim to map the old port, look for wrecks and trace how sea levels and the Cauvery's course have changed.

Set this against the texts:

• Pattinappalai, the Sangam poem centred on Kaveripoompattinam, describes a city where people of many lands and languages lived side by side.
• Silappathikaram and the Buddhist epic Manimekalai later describe Puhar as a major urban and maritime centre.
• Later Tamil tradition places a Yavana settlement near the waterfront, among merchants, warehouses and imported goods. Now there is an object at Puhar that was made far to the west. The poems are no longer the only witness.

Where the Parallel Breaks This is

where the Arikamedu precedent stops being reassuring. A torpedo jar is a poor clock. These vessels circulated for several centuries. At Pattanam in Kerala, the site widely proposed as Muziris, torpedo jars appear in assemblages that run from the Sasanian period (224-651 CE) into the Early Islamic period.

A fragment at Puhar could therefore belong to the world of the Sangam poets or to traders who came several centuries after them. Archaeologists date such jars by their context: the layer they sit in and the objects found with them.

Underwater, that context is exactly what currents and shifting sediment tend to disturb. No firm date has yet been assigned to the Poompuhar fragments. Scale matters as well. The department says only about 10 per cent of the planned exploration is complete, so most of the evidence is still underwater.

For the exam: much of India's ancient history is built where text and object meet. The strongest answers state what an object confirms and also what it cannot.