IN ALL PROBABILITY, the earliest form of Tamil rule, of which we are afforded some glimpses here and there in this literature, was a sort of communal republic wherein each adult male member of the community had a voice in the direction of public affairs. Although we discover the Pāṇḍiya and the Chera rulers as full-fledged kings, the origin of the Chola line of sovereigns throws considerable light on the primitive communal republics. The people seem to have existed as village communities under the direction of Kilārs or the village elders. The eldest member of the family had the direction of affairs in his hands, assisted of course by the village assembly periodically convoked. The term 'Kilamai' means right of possession. This abstract concept is undoubtedly a later growth and should have denoted at first the right of the village elders or Kilavar. In course of time, the village communities grew in number and size and then they held together as a union or confederacy of a number of such communities presided over by a Veḷ, Ko or king. This Veḷ or Ko had a number of Kilārs under him each representing a village. Though the Kilārs and Veḷs were the executive heads and presidents of their respective village assemblies and confederacies, their powers were probably very limited in peace time by the authority of the general assemblies of the villages. This type of political organisation was wholly the result of the peaceful and settled condition of an agricultural community, organised for peaceful pursuits. It is to these early types of communal republics that the Aśoka's edict refers. No name of an individual king is therein mentioned in the south, as in the case of the western sovereigns. They are called the Cholas, the Palayas, the Kera aputras and the Satiyaputras, all communaḷ names beyond doubt. It would be highly unhistorical to read the type of princely autocracies evolved later on in the Tamil land into the early conditions of the third century B.C. All that is intended to be conveyed here is that the Tamil autocracies depicted in these works were certainly preceded by another type of political organisation which was peculiarly republican and Dravidian in its character. By the time of the generations comprised in the Tables the old organisation had well-nigh lost its original vigour and a process of dissolution had set in. For territorial expansion the peaceful agricultural communities seem to have placed themselves under leaders of military genius, who later on turned into autocrats, pure and simple, and robbed the communities of their original rights and powers. In short, independence was the heavy price the communities had to pay, for the doubtful advantage of new territorial acquisitions. This is the picture we get from the earliest references bearing on the Chola rule.