It also includes chapters on friendship, love, sexual union, and domestic life. In addition, it highlights truthfulness, self-restraint, gratitude, hospitality, kindness, goodness of wife, duty, giving, and so forth, besides covering a wide range of social and political topics such as king, ministers, taxes, justice, forts, war, greatness of army and soldier's honor, death sentence for the wicked, agriculture, education, abstinence from alcohol and intoxicants. The Kural is traditionally praised with epithets and alternate titles such as "the Tamil Veda" and "the divine book." Written on the foundations of ahimsa, it emphasizes non-violence and moral vegetarianism as virtues for an individual. The traditional accounts describe it as the last work of the third Sangam, but linguistic analysis suggests a later date of 450 to 500 CE and that it was composed after the Sangam period. The text has been dated variously from 300 BCE to 5th century CE.
Its authorship is traditionally attributed to Valluvar, also known in full as Thiruvalluvar. Considered one of the greatest works ever written on ethics and morality, it is known for its universality and secular nature. The text is divided into three books with aphoristic teachings on virtue ( aram), wealth ( porul) and love ( inbam), respectively.
The Tirukkuṟaḷ ( Tamil: திருக்குறள், lit.'sacred verses'), or shortly the Kural, is a classic Tamil language text consisting of 1,330 short couplets, or kurals, of seven words each.