Stone Inscriptions, Devikapuram
There
are about 56 stone inscriptions in this sthalam of which 55 are found in the
Periyanayagi Amman temple and one in the Kanakagiriswarar Temple at the top of
the hill. It is surmised that both these shrines should have been built during
the regimes of the Vijayanagar kings.
One of
the oldest stone inscriptions relates to the Maharashtra king another belongs
to the Jagirthar of Arni and the remaining 53 stone inscriptions relate to the
period of the Vijayanagar Kings. Two of the inscriptions are found in Sanskrit,
one in Marathi and the rest in Tamil.
There
are many Tamil inscriptions of Vijayanagar times which are inscribed on the
walls of a Siva temple & Periyanayaki Amman Temple in Devikapuram,
Thiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu, in South India. Thirteen of these inscriptions
record the lease of temple lands to individuals or institutions on certain
conditions.
Not only
in the Devikapuram inscriptions but also in the inscriptions of many other
localities, there are similar cases of the leasing of the temple land. Such
abundance of evidence of the lease of temple lands leads us to infer that the
lease system was probably of importance among the various systems of land
tenure prevailing in the Vijayanagar Empire.