Tirumayam, situated on a Precambrian granite hillock in the Pudukkottai district of Tamil Nadu, is one of the most historically layered heritage complexes in southern India, combining prehistoric rock art, seventh- and eighth-century Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava rock-cut cave temples, and a seventeenth-century hill fort within a single granite landscape. This article presents an integrative multi-period analysis of the site's geographical setting, prehistoric antecedents, epigraphic record, architectural composition, religious landscape, and conservation status, drawing on epigraphic evidence, architectural documentation, regional gazetteers, and recent archaeological survey reports. Existing scholarship on Tirumayam has remained disciplinarily fragmented — epigraphers documenting inscriptions, architectural historians analysing the cave temples, and regional historians reconstructing the Sethupathi–Tondaiman political sequence — without a sustained analysis treating the site as a coherent cultural landscape. Addressing this gap, the article argues that Tirumayam's significance derives from the cumulative character of its successive occupations, in which each phase inherited and reinterpreted the symbolic authority established by the phase before it, and from the systematic exploitation of granite terrain as both a defensive and a symbolic resource. The study concludes by identifying urgent conservation priorities, particularly for the deteriorating prehistoric rock art, and by situating Tirumayam within the wider challenge of writing integrative histories of multi-period South Indian heritage sites...