t of the Huns was followed by another period of obscurity, but
at the beginning of the seventh century Harsha (606-647 A.D.), a prince
of Thanesar, founded after thirty-five years of warfare a state which
though it did not outlast his own life emulated for a time the
dimensions and prosperity of the Gupta Empire. We gather from the
account of the Chinese pilgrim Hsuean Chuang, who visited his court at
Kanauj, that the kings of Bengal, Assam and Ujjain were his vassals but
that the Panjab, Sind and Kashmir were independent. Kalinga, to the
south of Bengal, was depopulated but Harsha was not able to subdue
Pulakesin II, the Calukya king of the Deccan.

Let us now turn for a moment to the history of the south. It is even
more obscure both in events and chronology than that of the north, but
we must not think of the Dravidian countries as uninhabited or
barbarous. Even the classical writers of Europe had some knowledge of
them. King Pandion (Pandya) sent a mission to Augustus in 20 B.C.[120]
Pliny[121] speaks of Modura (Madura) and Ptolemy also mentions this town
with about forty others. It is said[122] that there was a temple
dedicated to Augustus at Muziris, identified with Cranganore. From an
early period the extreme south of the peninsula was divided into three
states known as the Pandya, Cera and Cola kingdoms[123]. The first
corresponded to the districts of Madura and Tinnevelly. Cera or Kerala
lay on the west coast in the modern Travancore. The Cola country
included Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Madras, with the greater part of Mysore.
From the sixth to the eighth century A.D. a fourth power was important,
namely the Pallavas, who apparently came from the north of the Madras
Presidency. They had their capital at Conjeevaram and were generally at
war with the three kingdoms. Their king, Narasimha-Varman (625-645 A.D.)
ruled over part of the Deccan and most of the Cola country but after
about 750 they declined, whereas the Colas grew stronger and Rajaraja
(985-1018) whose dominions included the Madras Presidency and Mysore
made them the paramount power in southern India, which position they
retained until the thirteenth century.

As already mentioned, the Deccan was ruled by the Andhras from 220 B.C.
to 236 A.D., but for the next three centuries nothing is known of its
history until the rise of the Calukya dynasty at Vatapi (Badami) in
Bijapur. Pulakesin II of this dynasty (608-642), a contemporary of
Harsha, was for some ti