maintain the Kantalai tank and the temple itself. The effects of this saw the Vanni region flourish. The Vanniar claim descent from this chief. Kullakottan's restorations took place despite interferences from the queen of the Pandyan King Pandia, who was absent from his throne in Anuradhapura on a visit to Jaffna. Kullakottan constructed and re-established the large temple of Shiva, the temple of Vishnu and that of the Mother-Goddess (Tirukkamakkottam) on the promontory, these shrines of the compound becoming the Three Pagodas of Tirukonamalai. The Yalpana Vaipava Malai and Konesar Kalvettu, as well as a 16th-century Tamil inscription in Trincomalee and Tamil copper-plate inscriptions of the temple relate many details about Kullakottan's founding of Trincomalee and the Vanni. Modern historians and anthropologists agree as historically factual the connection of the Vanniars with the Konesar temple. Dating the reign of the king has proved difficult. The Konesar Kalvettu dates Kullakottan's renovations to specifically between 432 and 440. C. Rasanayagam notes that the Vanniar chiefs who were in control of the temple could not have multiplied so fast within 150 years causing the king Aggrabodhi I of Anuradhapura to take elaborate steps to contain the Vanniars in 593. He argues the Vanniars of the Vannimai were a buffer state between Trincomalee and Mannar from the classical period. Other historians suggest that Kullakottan arrived to the island during the island's reign of The Five Dravidians of Pandyan descent, between 103 and 88 BCE, corroborating the Yalpana Vaipava Malai equation of his grandfather Manu Needhi Chola's identity with that of Ellalan Chola, a historical king who ruled the island from 205 to 161 BCE that shared many character traits with the legendary Manu Needhi. In Geography of Avienus, a poem of Latin geographer and writer Rufius Festus Avienius in 350 CE, the author bases his writing on the island on Orbis descriptio by Alexandrian Greek poet Dionysius Periegetes (117—138 CE), who called the island the "great Island of Coliadis" whose inhabitants worship the multi-towered Cholian temple to Venus on their Cholian rock promontory by the sea. A twelfth-century commentary on Periegetes by Eustathius of Thessalonica also compares the shape of Konesar Malai to a phallus. The Portuguese historian De Quieroz cited poetic and inscriptional evidence to date Kullakottan's renovations to 1589 BCE, based on a Tamil poem by Kavi Raja Virothayan he read which was translated into English in 1831 by Simon Cassie Chitty.