Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning the 5th century BCE to the 8th century CE.The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from between the 5th and 2nd century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam, an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old as the 1st century BC.