Old Tamil

Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE.^[4] Prior to Old Tamil, the period of Tamil linguistic development is termed as Proto-Tamil. After the Old Tamil period, Tamil becomes Middle Tamil. The earliest records in Old Tamil are inscriptions from between the 3rd and 1st century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil-Brahmi.^[1][5][6] 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.^[7][8] Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, the reconstructed common ancestor of the Dravidian languages, including inventory of consonants, the syllable structure, and various grammatical features.