The plinth of Brihadeeswara is, by surface area, the largest single piece of legible medieval Indian writing that survives. One hundred and seven distinct inscriptions, covering roughly 64,000 square centimetres of incised granite, wrap the temple in chiselled Tamil and Sanskrit for the full circumference of the lower wall.

The contents are not religious. They are, overwhelmingly, administrative: lists of donors, lists of dancers, lists of accountants, lists of village endowments, lists of gold weights, lists of supplied paddy. The Brihadeeswara plinth is the central documentary record of an early imperial state. The temple is its receipt.

What the inscriptions are.

The 107 inscriptions can be classified by patron, by date and by content. By patron, roughly two-thirds date from the reign of Raja Raja Chola I himself (1003 – 1014) and another quarter from his son Rajendra I (1014 – 44). The rest are scattered through the late Chola period, with a final clutch of Pandyan and Vijayanagara additions through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

By content, the inscriptions fall into four functional categories: royal donations (gold, silver and land assigned to the temple establishment); personnel records (the names and home villages of those serving the temple); supplier endowments (the named villages assigned to supply the daily worship); and administrative orders (state acts recorded on the most visible public surface available).

The form — meykkirti and after.

Every major Chola inscription opens with the meykkirti, the formal court eulogy. The Raja Raja meykkirti at Brihadeeswara begins with the formula tirumaḻai-vaḻutiya — “crowned by the sacred chaplet” — and runs through a recitation of the king's conquests: the Cheras at Vizhinjam; the Pandyas at Madurai; Ilam (Sri Lanka); Gangapadi; the Maldives.

After the eulogy the inscription gets down to its actual business: a specific royal order, a donation, an endowment, a tax-exemption. The eulogy and the business are carved consecutively, the eulogy in a slightly larger hand. The eulogy serves both as a date-stamp — different versions of the meykkirti are used in different years of the reign, which lets us date individual inscriptions to within a few months — and as a rhetorical frame.

“The Brihadeeswara plinth is to medieval South Indian historiography what the Old Bailey Sessions Papers are to seventeenth-century London — the densest single administrative document of its era, anywhere in the world.”— Y. Subbarayalu, South India under the Cholas, Oxford, 2012

Donors, dancers, accountants.

The single most ethnographically detailed inscription is the personnel record of the temple establishment. Four hundred devaradiyars — temple dancers — are listed by name and home village. Two hundred and twelve musicians (drummers, conch-players, lute-players) are listed similarly, each one with a specified daily ration of paddy and an annual allowance of cloth.

The list continues with the priests (about seventy positions), the scribes and accountants (around forty), the dance-masters, the singers, the lamp-keepers, the garland-makers, the gold-smiths, the silver-smiths, the carpenters, the parasol-bearers and the sweepers. The total establishment is approximately a thousand named individuals. It is, by some margin, the most detailed surviving census of any medieval Indian institution.

The supplier-villages.

The temple ran on a network of approximately a hundred and fifty named villages, each assigned to supply specific quantities of paddy, oil, ghee, fruit, flowers and man-power on a recurring schedule. The villages are scattered across the lower Kaveri, the Coromandel coast, the Pandyan country and — most striking of all — northern Sri Lanka, conquered by Raja Raja in 993.

The total annual paddy endowment runs to approximately 70,000 kalams (a Chola dry measure of about 8.5 kg), or some 600 tonnes a year. The supply was organised through the village assemblies (sabha for Brahmin settlements, ūr for the ordinary villages), each of which administered its share of the obligation and was responsible for delivering the goods to the temple treasury at Thanjavur on a fixed calendar.

The treasury record.

A second class of inscription catalogues the temple treasury: the gold and silver liturgical equipment, the gem-set ornaments, the bronze processional images, the silk canopies, the brass lamps. Each item is given with its weight, in kazhanju (gold) or palam (silver), and with the name of its donor.

Royal donations dominate but are not the whole story. Raja Raja's sister, Kundavai, and his various consorts contributed substantially. So did senior generals (thesenapatis), provincial governors, merchant guilds, and ordinary devotees from the imperial capital. The temple ran a treasury system that effectively functioned as a state bank, with the donations forming a long-term reserve against which the daily worship was financed.

Scribal hand and dating.

The inscriptions are carved in mature Tamil-Grantha script, a hybrid that allows the scribe to write Tamil in the lower line and Sanskrit (for divine names and royal titles) in the upper, with Grantha letters interlined. The hand is regular, generously spaced, and easily readable today by anyone trained in late Chola palaeography.

Dating works by reference to the king's regnal year — “the eighteenth year of the reign of Rajakesari Arulmozhivarman” pegs the inscription to 1003 CE — and by cross-reference to the meykkirti version. A small set of inscriptions also include an astronomical date (sun in a given lunar mansion), which lets epigraphers fix the day within a single year-cluster.

Reading them today.

The corpus was first systematically read and published by Eugen Hultzsch in the 1890s as part of the South Indian Inscriptions series. Volume II (1891) and Volume III (1899) cover the Brihadeeswara plinth. The published edition is still authoritative, though modern revisions — particularly Subbarayalu's economic-historical re-reading of the 1980s — have refined the interpretation considerably.

For the visitor in 2026, the inscriptions are visible but not legible: they run as bands of weathered Tamil-Grantha around the plinth at knee height, perfectly preserved in the granite but unrecognisable without training. The ASI offers explanatory plaques at three points around the temple, with English summaries of the most important sections.

If you want to see the headline inscription

The principal Raja Raja dedicatory inscription begins on the south wall of the plinth, immediately west of the main entrance to the inner courtyard. The first eleven lines contain the meykkirti; the body of the donation record runs for another forty-odd lines and wraps around the south-west corner. An ASI interpretive panel sits opposite, on the courtyard wall, with the English summary.

Further reading

  • Eugen Hultzsch (ed.), South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. II – III, ASI, 1891 – 1899 — the foundational published corpus.
  • K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Cōḷas, University of Madras, 1955 — the standard historical reading.
  • Y. Subbarayalu, South India under the Cholas, Oxford, 2012 — the modern inscription-led revisionist account.
  • Noboru Karashima, South Indian History and Society: Studies from Inscriptions, Oxford, 1984 — for comparative South Indian inscription studies.