The most valuable thing at Thanjavur may not be the architecture. The base of the temple carries an extraordinary quantity of inscription, and it is administrative rather than devotional. The texts record who endowed what, which villages were assigned to pay for which service, how much grain and gold went where, and the names and duties of the people attached to the temple: dancers, singers, drummers, accountants, watchmen, garland makers, lamp lighters, potters and washermen.
Richard Salomon's handbook on Indian epigraphy treats South Indian temple inscriptions of this kind as one of the richest documentary sources for the medieval subcontinent, because they were cut into a building that was never demolished and they describe ordinary economic arrangements that no literary text bothers to mention. What they show at Thanjavur is a temple functioning as a landholder, an employer and a redistributor of agricultural surplus on a large scale. That has consequences for how the Chola state should be understood, and historians have argued at length about whether such temples were instruments of royal power, autonomous corporations, or something between the two. The atlas records the inscriptions as attested and the interpretation of the temple economy as an open scholarly question, since the same texts support more than one reading.