This article presents and analyses a corpus of thirty Tamil inscriptions located in the region of the Kāvēri river related to a Pāṇḍyan king called Māṟancaṭaiyaṉ Varaguṇa Mahārāja. This king, identified as Varaguṇa II whose reign may have begun around 862 A.D., appears to have conquered the Kāvēri region and maintained his sovereignty over this highly coveted territory over a period of 13 years, starting in his 4th regnal year. Almost half of the epigraphs gathered in this corpus record donations by the king himself, and, if the places where they were engraved seem to echo a sacred pattern found in the Tamil hymns of Bhakti, bestowing upon Varaguṇa an aura of king-devotee, these gifts, inserted in a network of significantly powerful locations in the socio-political and religious context of the 9th century, become “gifts of power”.

中文翻译：

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奉献与统治

本文介绍并分析了位于 Kāvēri 河地区的 30 处泰米尔语铭文语料库，这些铭文与名为 Māṟancaṭaiyaṉ Varaguṇa Mahārāja 的 Pāṇḍyan 国王有关。这位国王，被确定为瓦拉古纳二世，其统治可能始于公元 862 年左右，似乎已经征服了 Kāvēri 地区，并在 13 年的时间里保持了他对这片令人垂涎的领土的主权，从他的第 4 个统治年开始。在这个语料库中收集的几乎一半的铭文都记录了国王本人的捐赠，而且，如果雕刻它们的地方似乎与奉爱的泰米尔赞美诗中的神圣图案相呼应，赋予 Varaguṇa 国王奉献者的光环，那么这些在 9 世纪的社会政治和宗教背景下，插入具有显着影响力的地点的网络中的礼物成为“权力的礼物”。