Old Tamil

Old Tamil is the form of the Tamil language used from the 3rd century BCE to the seventh century CE, following Proto-Tamil and preceding Middle Tamil. The earliest records in Old Tamil are inscriptions from between the 3rd and 1st century BCE in caves and on pottery, written in the Tamil-Brahmi variant of the Brahmi script. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the mid-2nd century BCE. Old Tamil preserves many features of Proto-Dravidian, the reconstructed common ancestor of the Dravidian languages, including the inventory of consonants, the syllable structure, and various grammatical features.