southern India with Sage Agastya (who had his ashrama in the south). Agastya appears prominently in medieval Tamil literature also. Folklores attributes Alli Rani (meaning "the queen Alli") as one of the early historic rulers of the Pandyas. She is attributed as an "amazonian queen" whose servants were men and administrative officials and army were women. She is thought of ruling the whole western and northern coast of Sri Lanka from her capital Kudiramalai, where remains of what is thought of as her fort are found. She is sometimes seen as an incarnation of the Pandya associated gods, Meenakshi and Kannagi. Chandra-vamsa The medieval Pandya kings were claimed to have belonged to the Chandra-vamsa or the Lunar Race. They claimed Pururavas and Nahusha as ancestors. Pururavas is listed as one of the ancestors in the Velvikudi Inscription of Nedunjadaiyan Varaguna-varman I (Jatila Parantaka Nedunjadaiyan). Sources of Pandya history The Greek ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya, Megasthenes mentions Queens of Pandyas as 'Pandaia' and locates them in the south of India extending into ocean. It consisted of 365 villages which met the needs of the royal palace each day of the year. He described the queen as daughter of Heracles (by some author as Shiva or Krishna). Madurai, capital of Pandyas is mentioned in Kautilya's Arthashastra (4th century BCE) as 'Mathura of the south'. Archaeological sources Pandyas are also mentioned in the inscriptions of Maurya emperor Asoka (3rd century BCE). In his inscriptions (2nd and 13th Major Rock Edict) Asoka refers to the peoples of south India – the Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas and Satiyaputras. These polities, although not part of the Maurya empire, were on friendly terms with Asoka: The earliest Pandya to be found in epigraph is Nedunjeliyan, figuring in the Tamil-Brahmi Mangulam inscription (near Madurai) assigned to 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. The record documents a gift of rock-cut beds, to a Jain ascetic. It is assumed that the people found in the Mangulam inscription, Nedunjeliyan, Kadalan, and Izhanchadikan predates rulers such as Talaiyanganam Nedunjelyan and Palyaga-salai Mudukudimi Peruvaludi. Kharavela, the Kalinga king who ruled during c. 1st century BCE, in his Hathigumpha inscription, claims to have destroyed an old confederacy of Tamil countries ("the tamira–desa–sanghata") which had lasted 132 years, and to have acquired a large quantity of pearls from the Pandyas. Silver punch-marked coins with the fish symbol of the Pandyas dating from around the same time have