The Kollam (Tarisappalli) Copper Plates

The first set of plates records that Ayyan Adigal Tiruvadi, who governed Venad, granted families of workers, with exemption from named taxes, to the Tarisa church built at Kurakkeni Kollam by a man whom the text calls Eso da Tapir and Maruvan Sapir Iso. The church’s own people were to judge any offence those families committed. The second set continues the grant, and its last plate bears the signatures of witnesses in what the editor, following earlier scholars, describes as Pahlavi, Kufic and Hebrew characters. He identifies Kurakkeni Kollam with the modern Quilon (Kollam).

The plates give only the regnal year, the fifth of King Sthanu Ravi. Gopinatha Rao, who edited them in 1916, assigned them on the form of the letters to the ninth century or the earlier part of the tenth (p. 62). The chronology of the Syro-Malabar eparchy cited in this wiki gives the year as 849, without naming a source (Significant Dates in the History of the Syro-Malabar Church). The editor’s translation does not mention the apostle Thomas. The plates are cited for the Apostle Thomas and the Christians of India as evidence of Christians on the Kerala coast.