So far as is known, the Sumerian Heroic Age is the oldest, preceding the oldest of the Indo-European Heroic Ages, that of the Greeks, by more than a millenium and a half. The Indo-Aryan or (North) Indian Heroic Age probably dates only a century or so later than that of Greece.
One could venture to say that the Tamil Heroic Age comes next in time, preceding the Teutonic Heroic Age of about the fourth century A.D. The Tamil Heroic Age should be placed somewhere in the fourth or fifth century B.C.
Now, what is of interest to us here is that the bulk of the heroic poetry which has come down to us, portrays the emergence of the three principal kingdoms from among innumerable tribal organisations and village communities. This epoch in a nation’s history is violent but brilliant, short-lived but glorious, convulsive but opulent. As elsewhere, the politics of the Tamil Heroic Age were marked by the ascendancy of an “energetic military caste, which torn by internecine conflicts of succession and inheritance breaks loose from its tribal bonds into a career of violent, self-assertive individualism.
