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History is the backbone of all arts and
sciences. Every science is but an unbroken chain of facts and truths discovered
or found by researchers and men of experience from time to time. While
history, pure and simple, mainly narrates events stating the time, place,
agency, aim and result of them, science generally records or describes
only the results of events.
Sciences
may be divided into two kinds, viz., the dependent and the independent.
Philology is a dependent science relying upon all others, the chief among
them being History, Human Physiology, Psychology and Anthropology. As
philology is at once descriptive, comparative and historical, it is impossible
to study the science correctly, if any of the three aspects is dispensed
with. It is highly regrettable, that this important science has deteriorated,
of late, into Descriptive Linguistics in the Western countries after the
time of Dr.Caldwell, as a result of divorcing History from it completely.
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2.
The Nature of the History of Ancient Tamil Nadu
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The history of a country may exist either
written or unwritten. Written history may be true or false or partially
true. Unwritten history may be extinct or descriptive or narrative. As
the Tamil nation (or for that matter the Dravidian race) is of Lemurian
origin, and as all the pre-Aryan Tamil literature and the post-Vedic pre-Sangam
works, with a few exceptions, have been destroyed the pre-Christian history
of Tamil Nadu can only be of descriptive nature.
The
post-Christian history of Tamil Nadu has already been written fairly well
by many historians and historiographers.
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