a land lost to the ocean also helped the tamil revivalists provide an explanation for the lack of historically verifiable or scientifically acceptable material evidence about this ancient civilization. the earliest extant tamil writings, which are attributed to the third sangam, contain sanskrit vocabulary, and thus could not have been the creation of a purely tamil civilization. connecting the concept of lemuria to an ancient tamil civilization allowed the tamil revivalists to portray a society completely free of indo-aryan influence. they could claim that the various signs of the ancient tamil civilization had been lost in the deep ocean. the later dominance of sanskrit was offered as another explanation for the deliberate destruction of ancient tamil works. in the 1950s, r. nedunceliyan, who later became tamil nadu's education minister, published a pamphlet called "marainta tiravitam" ("lost dravidian land"). he insisted that the brahmin historians, being biased towards sanskrit, had deliberately kept the knowledge of the tamil's greatness hidden from the public.