The Ecology of Friendship: Early Tamil Landscapes of Irony and Voice

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-35
Author(s):  
Martha Ann Selby
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Relationship ◽  
South India ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Foster Mother ◽  
Love Poetry ◽  
Female Friendship ◽  
The Third ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Biological Mother ◽  
Modern Britain

This article is a brief study of four female characters—a pair of daughters and a pair of mothers—who give voice to the majority of the poems in the Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, an Old Tamil anthology of love poetry from the early decades of the third century CE. Taking cues from recent ethnographies on friendship in South Asia and from Alan Bray’s compelling study of friendship in modern Britain, I will examine the ways in which bonds between female friends are expressed in the dense natural imagery so characteristic of Old Tamil convention, most often found within the poems in double entendre and in brief, almost allegorical statements. I focus primarily on the figure of the tōḻi, the ‘girlfriend’, who speaks with greatest frequency in these poems as she acts as the mediator between the talaivi (the ‘heroine’) and the talaivaṉ (the ‘hero’) through every stage of their romantic relationship, and also between the talaivi and her mothers—the cevili-t-ta −y or ‘foster mother’ and the naṟṟa −y, the ‘biological mother’ of the talaivi. In passing, I will briefly contrast this quartet with the voices of their corresponding male characters, which we hear especially within the context of the pa −caṟai, the ‘war camp’. I will analyze how the voices of the characters change—both in content and in register—according to shifts in poetic settings, and will discuss what these shifts can tell us about aesthetic representations of female friendship in early South India. Through a study of the conversational settings among these characters, I will illustrate how friendship, intimacy and love are conveyed in language and rhetorical gesture.

Theriya Networks and the Circulation of the Pali Canon in South Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Alexander Wynne
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South India ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Pali Canon ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
Pāli Canon

This article offers further support for Lance Cousins’ thesis that the P?li canon, written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka, was based largely on a Theriya manuscript tradition from South India. Attention is also given to some of Cousins’ related arguments, in particular, that this textual transmission occurred within a Vibhajjav?din framework; that it occurred in a form of ‘proto-P?li’ close to the Standard Epigraphical Prakrit of the first century BCE; and that that distinct Sinhalese nik?yas emerged perhaps as late as the third century CE.  

Ten Days of Wandering and Romance with Lord Raṅkanāta;ṉ: The Pa;ṉkuṋi Festival in Śriraṅkam Temple, South India

1982 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Younger
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Continuous Performance ◽  
The Third ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Temple

In the third century, a poet in the ancient Cōḻ capital of Uṟaiyūr, on the banks of the Kāvērī river opposite the island of Śrīraṅkam, looked into the sad face of his lover and said that her face reminded him of the bank of the Kāavērī strewn with stalks of banana plants after the celebration of the Paṅkuṇi festival on Śrīraṅkam island. Although this early reference to the Paṅkuṇi festival being celebrated on Śrīraṅkam island dates from a period when the great Paṅkuṇi temple must have been at most a minor shrine, it seems likely that the Paṅkuṇi festival of today is a direct descendent of that early celebration. When inscriptions were carved on the temple walls between the tenth and eighteenth centuries they regularly mention the Paṅkuṇi festival as one of the main features of the temple's ritual, and references in the temple chronicle also seem to assume a continuous performance of this festival. As other festivals began to crowd into the temple calendar the Pankuni festival came to be known as the Āti festival or the ‘Original’ Festival in order to distinguish it from all others.

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Gold
Keyword(s):  
Third Century ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Status ◽  
Key Issues

This chapter discusses the key issues surrounding Perpetua’s life and her narrative, the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis. It introduces the most perplexing circumstances around her life and times: the authorship of her Passio (which is written in at least three different hands); her life and family; the conditions of her martyrdom and of martyrdoms during the pre-Constantinian period; the status of martyrdom texts as personal, social, or historical documents; whether persecutions can be historically verified or were exaggerated by the Christians and others; and the afterlife of Perpetua and her text in writers from the third century to contemporary times. The introduction lays out the arguments for these thorny issues and tries to find a reasonable position on each one.

Letters from High to Low in the Graeco-Roman Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willy Clarysse
Keyword(s):  
Roman Period ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
The Third ◽  
Total Lack

In this chapter, papyrus letters sent from superiors to their inferiors are studied on the basis of test cases ranging across the Graeco-Roman period in Egypt, from the third century BCE to the third century CE. This correspondence is drawn from four archival groups of texts: the archive of Zenon; the letters of L. Bellienus Gemellus and the letters of the sons of Patron; and the Heroninus archive. The letters are usually short, full of imperatives, and characterized by the absence of philophronetic formulae. Recurrent themes of the correspondence are urgency, rebukes, orders, and interdictions, and there is an almost total lack of polite phrases.

‘At last Roman, at last restored to the true light of Empire’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrastos Omissi
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Military ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter begins by considering what made the late Roman state distinctive from the early Empire, exploring the political developments of the later third century, in particular the military, administrative, and economic reforms undertaken by the tetrarchs. It then explores the presentation of the war between the tetrarchy and the British Empire of Carausius and Allectus (286‒96), taking as its core sources Pan. Lat. X, XI, and VIII. These speeches are unique in the panegyrical corpus, in that two of them (X and XI) were delivered while the usurpation they describe was still under way, the third (VIII) after it was defeated. In this chapter, we see how the British Empire was ‘othered’ as piratical and barbarian, and how conflict with it helped to create the distinctive ideology of the tetrarchy.

Inscriptions and the Narrative of Roman History

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Potter
Keyword(s):  
Roman History ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Sources

This chapter offers an analysis of how inscriptions can complement the narratives of Roman history from the third century BCE to the third century CE provided in literary sources. They reveal certain historical events or details that would otherwise be unknown, and they supplement the information offered by the surviving Roman historians .

THE DATING OF PHILIPPOS OF AMPHIPOLIS (BNJ 280 T2)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Brent Arehart
Keyword(s):  
Short Note ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third

Abstract On the basis of two neglected testimonia, this short note argues that the terminus ante quem for Philippos of Amphipolis (BNJ 280) should be moved forward to the third century or to the early fourth century c.e. if not earlier.

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