No. 63.— 1910.] 
TANTRI-MALAI. 
83 
theory that " Updtissa Nuwara " may have been near or at 
Tantri-malai.* Upatissa, the capital before the rise of Anuradha- 
pura, must have been a large town, and I think that had it been 
here, we should certainly find some systematic water suppl}^ 
in use from the earliest times, instead of finding, as we do, 
that the first monastery was dependent upon the water -holes. 
So far I have dwelt only upon the history of Tantri-malai 
as revealed by its archaeology ; but there is another question 
which may be found interesting. 
In three caves at Tantri-malai, in a cave at Billewa, 
and in a cave at Andiya-gala, two places a couple of miles 
apart and some three miles respectively south and south-west 
of Tantri-malai, I found rude drawings or paintings on the 
walls and roof. In each case the cave in which the pictures 
are is one which has a drip-ledge cut and has certainly been 
used as part of a monastery ; but the drawings are of a most 
primitive style, and certainly do not belong to the period of 
monastic occupation. The cave at Billewa has an inscription 
cut in characters which may belong to the third or fourth 
century a.d. ; the Andiya-gala cave has an inscription of the 
same or a little earlier date ; while, as we have seen, Tantri- 
malai was occupied up to the end of the twelfth century a.d. 
The drawings are therefore comparatively modern. 
The neighbourhood is almost entirely uninhabited, but 
the nearest villages on both the north and the south are 
occupied by Wanniyas. These people are called ' ' Verdar " by 
their Tamil neighbours on the north and " Veddo " by the 
Sinhalese to south of them, the word in either case meaning 
the same. They admit that they are Veddas of the Dunna 
gat warige, the " clan of the bow," but they call themselves 
Vil Wanniydr. For they are bi-lingual, and speak both Tamil 
and Sinhalese impartially. They claim community of race 
with the Tamankaduwa Veddas, but say that their clan is 
a separate one. I Curiously enough they claim descent from 
the Suriya-wansa, the original royal stock of the Sinhalese. 
* '* Ancient Ceylon," page 245. 
t The Veddo of Tamankaduwa are of the Tala-warige clan. B. 
Ed. Sec. 
g2 
