India, the Ganges Valley region, was much less accessible to invasion, and its climate and natural resources enforced a greater degree of cultural continuity. Invaders who entered its lush tropical environment from the North or West found it necessary to adopt local ways of life in order to survive. Southern India was in a position to receive and transmit cultural elements without outside pressure. It seems to have been much more important as a donor than as a borrower, sending out missionaries and adventurers who carried Indian civilization into Indonesia and the adjoining mainland. What it borrowed from foreign sources it took selectively and shaped to its own patterns....

We have already mentioned that the South Indian record does not go back much before the beginning of the Christian era, and that for even that period the information is far from adequate. Quite as in the North, the material culture and patterns of village life seem to have acquired very much their modern forms by the dawn of history. The economy was predominantly agricultural, but with all branches of technology well developed. All the Southeast Asiatic crops were raised, but the most important crop was irrigated rice. The plow. drawn by water buffalo, was used in preparing the rice paddies. Since this animal was also milked, in sharp contrast to the Southeast Asiatic pattern of animal usage, it seems probable that its utilization was modelled upon that of cattle in regions further north. The technology was equal, if not superior, to that of Northern India in the same period. Important buildings were of wood and were large and firmly constructed. Metal working was highly developed and steel was already being manufactured and exported. The aesthetic urge found expression in ivory and wood carving, weaving, and metal work. To judge from the artistic productions in the region in the somewhat later period of Buddhist dominance, the art was naturalistic and characterized by unusual vigour and motion.

The social organization and religion of the South are even more difficult to reconstruct. The best contemporary source is the Tolkappiyam, a Tamil work attributed to about the beginning of the Christian era. Although this is primarily a study of grammar, it includes dissertations on many other subjects. For purposes of cultural reconstruction it has the added advantage that Tamil seems to have been the most purely Dravidian of the languages spoken in South India and by far the most widespread at this period. The information which the work contains may therefore apply to much of Southern India.

According to this treatise, the Tamil-speaking people were originally divided into four groupings: the people of the mountain, of the forest, of the plain, and of the seacoast. Each division had its chief, and each carried on specialized activities based on the resources which