accepted now and a movement on so vast a scale could not have left South India untouched. In fact Mrs. Irawati Karve in her recent work which deals exhaustively with kinship organisation among Aryan and Dravidian races, establishes the fact that the kinship system of the Dravidian peoples, and even of the Marathas who have been Sanskritised in their language, bear striking similarity to the system prevalent in Polynesia. This, together with such other evidences as the introduction of the outrigged canoe, and the coconut, from the Pacific islands would seem to establish the fact that the racial and cultural relationships of South India were with the oceanic people even in prehistoric times. Mrs. Karve seems to hold the view that the dominant.peoples of South India who originated in the Pacific were moving towards the North and occupying the tableland when the Aryans were settling down in the Punjab and expanding into the Gangetic Valley and the two peoples met and mixed only in Gujarat where she has been able to find surviving traces of the Polynesian social culture. The momentum of both these parallel movements having broken down long before they reached the Deccan, the two people seem never to have met racially, though in historic times, Hindu religion and Sanskrit culture attained a preeminence which gave a top layer of Aryanism to these peoples.

Sylvain Levi has pointed out that the sea routes to the East from the ports of South India had come into common use many centuries before the Christian era. When we come to the historic times the maritime character of India's peninsular civilsation becomes even clearer. Early Tamil literature is replete with 'allusions to maritime trade. In a Tamil classic of the first century A.D. Kaveripattanam, the great port at the mouth of the river Cauveryis described thus: "The sun shone over the open terraces, over the warehouses near the harbour and over the turrets with windows like the eyes of deer. In different places of Puhar the onlooker's attention was arrested by the sight of the abode of Yavana whose prosperity never waned. At the harbour were to be seen sailors from distant lands". That this was not merely poetic imagery has now been proved by the excavartions at Arikamedu. An extensive trading centre with large ware houses for foreign merchants has been brought to light where apart from other interesting things, dated Roman potery has been discovered. According to the Cambridge Ancient History Italy imported more from India than from any other country except Spain Pliny computes Rome's annual payment to India at 550 million sesterces, and the yearly loss to Rome in the balance of trade at 100 millions.

It is also necessary to emphasise that unlike the Northern kings who were Āsamudra Kshitisās, kings whose territories extended to