The inscription is engraved on a stone slab discovered in 1911 by H. F. Tomalin, the Provincial Engineer at Galle, in a culvert near the turn to Cripps Road within that town and afterwards moved to the Colombo Museum. The slab features inscriptions in three different languages, enclosed within a floral border: Tamil (top-left), Persian (bottom-left, IN0351) and Chinese (right, IN0352). The Tamil inscription is dealt with here.
Following the discovery of the slab, the Chinese inscription was successfully transcribed and translated by Edmund Backhouse. However, Rao Bahadur H. Krishna Sastri (Assistant Superintendent for Epigraphy, Madras) and J. Horrovitz (Epigraphist for Moslem Inscriptions in India) failed in their efforts to decipher the Tamil and Persian texts respectively. Sometime later, the Tamil inscription was transcribed and translated for the third volume of Epigraphia Zeylanica (1933: 331–341) by Senarath Paranativana, who benefitted from having access to Backhouse’s translation of the Chinese text.
Like the Chinese inscription, the Tamil inscription is dated in the second month of the seventh year of Yuṅlo (Yung Lo), the Chinese emperor whose reign began in 1403 A.D. The text tells us that the Chinese emperor, having heard of the fame of the god Tenavarai-nāyaṉār in Sri Lanka, sent to him, through his envoys Ciṅvo and Uviṅcuviṅ, various kinds of offerings, of which a detailed list is given. Paranavitana notes that Tenavarai is the Tamil name for Devundara (Devunuvara), a settlement near Matara on the southern coast of Sri Lanka which was the centre of a cult dedicated to a deity known as Uppalavaṇṇa. Sometimes like the Purāṇic Viṣṇy in the Hindu tradition, this god was sometimes styled in Sinhalese ‘Devundara Deviyo’, which can be rendered in Tamil as ‘Tenavarai-nāyaṉār’. The other two inscriptions on the slab feature similar (though not identical) lists of offerings but the beneficiary is different in each case, being the Buddha in the Chinese text and an Islamic shrine or saint in the Persian. It therefore appears that, when the Chinese gained political ascendancy over Sri Lanka in 1409, they made gifts of equal value to several different religious traditions of the region and recorded these gifts on the same stone.
| Metadata | |
|---|---|
| Inscription ID | IN03150 |
| Title | Galle Trilingual Stele - Tamil Inscription |
| Alternative titles | |
| Parent Object | OB03125 |
| Related Inscriptions | IN03151 IN03152 IN03150 |
| Responsibility | |
| Author | Senarath Paranavitana |
| Print edition recorded by | |
| Source encoded | |
| Digitally edited by | |
| Edition improved by | |
| Authority for | |
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| Language | தமிழ் |
| Reigning monarch | |
| Commissioner | Yuṅlo (Yung Lo or Yongle) |
| Topic | records that the Chinese emperor, having heard of the fame of the god Tenavarai-nāyaṉār in Sri Lanka, sent to him, through his envoys Ciṅvo and Uviṅcuviṅ, various kinds of offerings |
| Date: | |
| Min | 1410 |
| Max | 1411 |
| Comment | Basis for dating: the inscription is dated in the second month of the seventh year of Yuṅlo (Yung Lo), the Chinese emperor whose reign began in 1403 A.D. |
| Hand | |
| Letter size | 0.635 cm |
| Description | The letters are unusually small for a stone inscription, some of them measuring less than a quarter of an inch (0.635 cm) in height and breadth. Tamil script of the fifteenth century A.D. |
| Layout | |
| Campus: | |
| Width | 39.37 |
| Height | 53.34 |
| Description | 24 lines shallowly engraved on the top-left portion of a stone slab. The first line is almost completely obliterated but the rest of the inscription remains tolerably legible. In addition to the Tamil record, the same slab also features inscriptions in two other languages: Persian, in the bottom-left portion of the slab, and Chinese, in the right-hand portion of the slab. The total area covered by all three inscriptions measures 3 foot 8 inches (111.76 cm) by 2 foot 3 inches (68.58 cm). |
| Decoration | A floral border surrounded the area covered by the three inscriptions. On either face of the top portion of the slab, of which the town corners are rounded, there is a carving of two dragons facing each other. |
| Bibliography | |
| References | In 1913, Edward W. Perera contributed a paper on the trilingual slab to the Spolia Zeylanica (vol. viii, pp. 122ff.), which included an account of its discovery and its historical importance, together with the text and translation of the Chinese inscription and the results of some unsuccessful attempts to decipher the Tamil and Persian records. Senarath Paranavitana’s edition and translation of the Tamil inscription were later published in Epigraphia Zeylanica 3 (1928–33): 331–341, no. 36. |
| Add to bibliography | |
| Misc notes | |