This is the mythical sanga-palagai with poets of ancient Tamil Sangam (assembly) trying to get on it. The poet Nakkirinar described about a stone palagai where the ancient poets might have sat on, and delibrated. A few centuries later, the lowly palagai had taken on mythical characteristics.
According to the Thiruvilayadal puranam, It all started in Benaras, Saraswati is cursed by Brahma to be born on Earth. She is born as the 48 syllables who become the poets. They travel all over the country winning over poets and eventually make their way to Madurai, Meenakshi Sundareshwar temple. Soon there is a question of credibility, which Shiva solves by offering a magical palagai which kept expanding to accommodate the (credible) 48 poets as they climb on. It is also said that Shiva became the 49th poet and led them. Subsequently the palagai was also seen to have floated over the temple tank of golden lotuses, and tipping off poets that didn't make the cut !
Of the three ancient sangams, the first two are beyond the pale of known history. The third period is dated between 300BC to 300AD. All existing corpus of sangam literature was supposed to have composed at the time of the ‘Sangam of Madurai’.
Some of the other ancient seats of learning were at Nalanda, Taxila, Alexandria and Greece. The School of Athens is a beautifully composed painting by Raphael that brings together the learned men (Plato, Aristotle and others) of ancient Greece under one roof
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