Early Cheras

The western kingdom

The Cheras held the country west of the Ghats and the passes through them, with an inland capital named Vañci and a coastal outlet at Muciri. Their emblem was the bow, and the Patiṟṟuppattu — the Ten Tens, a Sangam anthology devoted entirely to Chera kings — is the fullest source for them, praising a series of rulers in ten-poem decads.

The most celebrated of them is Ceṅkuṭṭuvaṉ, whose expedition to the north to obtain a stone for the image of Kaṇṇaki is the subject of the last part of the Cilappatikāram, the great Tamil epic. That work also makes him the founder of the Paṭṭiṉi cult of the chaste wife, one of the enduring goddess traditions of the south.

Muciri and Rome

Muciri, the Muziris of the Greek and Latin sources, appears in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and in Pliny as the great pepper port of India, reached by ships sailing directly across the Arabian Sea on the monsoon. A Sangam poem describes the Yavana ships arriving with gold and departing with pepper, and Roman coin hoards along the Kerala and Coimbatore routes bear it out.

The Muziris papyrus, a second-century contract from Egypt covering a cargo of pepper, ivory and textiles, gives the commercial scale in figures — a single shipment worth several million sesterces. The location of Muciri was long uncertain; excavations at Pattanam in Kerala since 2007 have produced Mediterranean amphorae and are widely, though not universally, taken to identify the site.

Afterwards

The early Chera line ends with the general collapse of the Sangam-age order after the third century CE. Rule on the Malabar coast resumes with the Kulaśekhara dynasty of Mahodayapuram in the ninth century, sometimes called the later Cheras, whose relation to the earlier house is a matter of claim rather than of demonstrated descent.