Saturday, April 23, 2016

Stone Inscriptions, Devikapuram

Stone Inscriptions, Devikapuram
There are about 56 stone inscriptions in this sthalam of which 55 are found in the Periyanayagi Amman temple and one in the Kanakagiriswarar Temple at the top of the hill. It is surmised that both these shrines should have been built during the regimes of the Vijayanagar kings.
One of the oldest stone inscriptions relates to the Maharashtra king another belongs to the Jagirthar of Arni and the remaining 53 stone inscriptions relate to the period of the Vijayanagar Kings. Two of the inscriptions are found in Sanskrit, one in Marathi and the rest in Tamil.
There are many Tamil inscriptions of Vijayanagar times which are inscribed on the walls of a Siva temple & Periyanayaki Amman Temple in Devikapuram, Thiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu, in South India. Thirteen of these inscriptions record the lease of temple lands to individuals or institutions on certain conditions.
Not only in the Devikapuram inscriptions but also in the inscriptions of many other localities, there are similar cases of the leasing of the temple land. Such abundance of evidence of the lease of temple lands leads us to infer that the lease system was probably of importance among the various systems of land tenure prevailing in the Vijayanagar Empire.