The collection of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, preserves a manuscript titled Risala-i-Padakah which was formerly in the library of the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan (d. 1799). This manuscript has descriptions of medals with drawings illustrating their forms. We investigate the design of these medals and assert that Tipu Sultan understood the importance of rewarding his loyal subordinates with medals, thus transferring his authority down to them. The ‘People's Medals’ given to non-combatants, a novel award for those times, are also covered here in detail. We show that some of these medals, reflecting Deccan jewellery traditions, were actually awarded by Tipu Sultan himself to his men, who wore them; and we draw attention to the plunder of these medals, along with other treasures, during the sack of Seringapatam. The authors also view this as a demonstration of Tipu Sultan's regard for loyalty, rank, as well as good governance in opposition to estimates of him by contemporary British biographers. This article is the first documentation of these medals, which were the earliest to be awarded by any state in pre-modern India.

This article investigates the use and frequency of what I refer to as the K-suffixes -ō/-ū/-o in the Shirazi dialects, namely, Old and Modern Shirazi. It shows that the use of K-suffixes as definiteness markers is more highly developed in Modern Shirazi than in Old Shirazi. In Old Shirazi, the K-suffix, with its original evaluative meaning, demonstrated some degree of multi-functionality. This has mostly been lost in Modern Shirazi, and the suffix is now used to express definiteness. The high frequency of use of the K-suffix appears to be independent of genre, speaker, and speech setting. Data from a corpus of written texts in Old Shirazi, mainly comprised of poems, are quantitatively analysed, along with data from a corpus of spoken Shirazi narratives and data from a questionnaire answered by ten speakers. The results show that an evaluative suffix can develop into a definiteness marker by passing through a stage of combination with deictic markers, which paves the way for extending the use of the K-suffix to include non-deictic anaphoric tracking. This article concludes that the development of definiteness marking can proceed down a pathway that is distinct from the one normally assumed for demonstrative-based definiteness marking, even if the endpoint may be similar. The detailed documentation of this process presented here is a further contribution to Iranian studies, and augments the small group of well-documented cases of a non-demonstrative origin of definiteness marking cross-linguistically.

Unlike other commentaries on the Sāṅkhyakārikā, the Yuktidīpikā (circa sixth to eighth centuries) problematised the Sāṅkhya tradition's equivocal attitudes toward the Veda. While submitting itself to the authority of the Veda, the Yuktidīpikā's commentary on Sāṅkhyakārikā 2 illustrates how Sāṅkhya thinkers of the post-Gupta period safeguarded the identity of Brahmin renouncers. Aligning its doctrine with the Upaniṣad, the end of the Veda, the Yuktidīpikā launched a Sāṅkhya navigation of the central concern of Indian intellectuals, Vedic hermeneutics, and attempted to secure Sāṅkhya's place within Vedic orthodoxy. This article discusses the Yuktidīpikā's strategy for surviving the peer pressure of Vedic ritualists, as represented by the Mīmāṃsakas, while maintaining Sāṅkhya superiority by exploiting the inner division within the Veda.

Central to this article is an Arabic letter written on papyrus in an Egyptian prison in the late ninth or early tenth century ce. The author complains that he and his companions are being kept in terrible conditions and that they have received insufficient support from outside prison. Interestingly, he indicates that there is a strong inclination among the group to offer themselves as slaves in order to find relief from their crushing living conditions. By doing so, they would have transgressed Islamic law of that time, which forbade the enslavement of free inhabitants of the Realm of Islam. The letter is a unique source for the social history of slavery, especially self-enslavement, in Abbasid society. This article presents, translates, and annotates this letter and offers a detailed study of its contents.

‘The dialogue between a cat and a mouse’ (Mārjāramūṣakasaṃvāda) is an animal fable used in the Mahābhārata to provide instruction in statecraft (nīti). This article argues that the Mahābhārata version of this tale must be based on an earlier soteriological allegory about a brahmin who provides spiritual liberation to a king in exchange for protection. The Mārjāramūṣakasaṃvāda abounds in terms and phrases that, in addition to their everyday meanings, have a technical or typical usage in the ascetic traditions of Ancient India. Moreover, the conversation between the cat and the mouse resembles that between a teacher and a disciple, rather than a discussion of a possible alliance between two kings. The hunter of the Mārjāramūṣakasaṃvāda can be identified with the Buddhist Māra. To support the plausibility of this soteriological reading, the article includes a discussion of Buddhist jātakas with a similar plot.

Dogs have played a vital and varied role in the social history of early China. Whether used as a source of food, a hunting-aid, or a sacrificial victim, dogs were intimately connected with human life and death. The placement and significance of dismembered and slaughtered dogs in human tombs have been a source of scholarly interest across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, less attention has been paid to sources which present us with a spectrum of concerns surrounding the treatment of dogs after their death. Should they be consumed, discarded, or buried? Which dogs were deserving of burial, and how were such burials viewed by human commentators? By analysing textual, archaeological, and material sources, this article explores the changing conceptualisation of dogs in life and in death through the medium of the tomb, showing how the transition from tomb-keeper to tomb-occupant reflects an increasingly anthropomorphic view of canine potential and moral fibre by the early medieval period.

The aim of this article is to show that in Achaemenid Elamite the sign <MAN> had a secondary phonetic value /me/. The evidence collected in support of this claim consists mainly in Elamite transcriptions of Iranian words in the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions and in the Persepolis administrative texts, which are impossible or very difficult to account for only contemplating the usual value /man/.

The Qara Khitai or Western Liao dynasty (1124–1218) is one of the most fascinating polities in medieval Eurasia, but also one of the least documented in terms of both literary sources and material culture. Founded by Khitan refugees who escaped from North China when the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) vanquished the Khitan Liao dynasty (907–1125), the Qara Khitai soon established a multicultural empire in Central Asia, combining Khitan, Chinese, and Muslim elements. The Buddhist Qara Khitai ruled over their mostly Muslim population in rare harmony until the rise of Chinggis Khan (r. 1206–1227). Hitherto only a few objects—and not a single structure—have been associated with this powerful empire. We argue that the Kök-Tash mausoleum, excavated in 2017–2018 and originally interpreted as a unique subterranean Muslim mausoleum, is actually the first-ever identified Qara Khitai elite tomb.

This unique tomb, located in the Kochkor valley of north-eastern Kyrgyzstan, about a day's ride from the Qara Khitai capital of Balāsāghūn, shares many similarities with the Liao tombs in North China, notably the typical Khitan mesh-wire burial suit. Yet it also uses local Central Asian materials and techniques, thereby manifesting how the Qara Khitai managed to retain their cultural identity in their new Central Asian and mostly Muslim environment. Moreover, identifying the Kök Tash mausoleum as a Qara Khitai tomb allows us to reassess several other unusual tombs excavated in the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to suggest attributing them, too, to the Qara Khitai.

Across the early modern Islamicate world, the phenomenon of eunuch slavery constitutes a significant aspect of courtly contexts and royal households. Although Mughal historiography has focused on the eunuch primarily in relation to the harem, this article analyses the function of such figures in regulating elite male space, in order to explore how these practices shaped both the representation of courtly life as well as the dynamics animating the Mughal court and the inner palace. As is shown in both textual and visual materials, enslaved, castrated men appear as figures both marking and mediating the perimeters of such spaces. In the process they played an important part in the spatial formation of access, intimacy, and hierarchical relations. However, their formative role in mediating elite social interactions at times entangled eunuchs in political conflict. The article concludes with an examination of a particularly dense archive of evidence from the reign of Aurangzeb dealing with royal princes. This material underlines the sometimes-precarious situation of eunuchs in moments of intrafamilial struggle, a fact which suggests the complicated reality of these kinds of intimate roles not only in Mughal princely households but wherever they took on such proximate positions.

A well-known series of miniature figures produced in India from unfired clay, appropriately clothed and in many instances represented carrying out their respective secular or ritual duties, enjoyed a period of particular popularity on the world stage in the nineteenth century when they were appropriated as illustrative devices in museum displays and international exhibitions. Over the previous half-century or more they had emerged as products of a dynamic industry that responded to changes in taste as well as religious and artistic practice within Indian society, before being taken up by the West to serve new colonial imperatives. There they received perhaps their most enthusiastic reception at the India Museum, established in the headquarters of the East India Company in London in the early 1800s, and surviving beyond the suppression of the Company itself until they were dispersed to a number of other institutions in 1879. From an early appearance at the Great Exhibition in 1851, the figures also became a regular feature of the international exhibitions of the latter part of the century. Initially they celebrated the traditional crafts and practices of India but gradually were recruited to communicate other messages of Western industrial dominance and perceived artistic and industrial superiority. Although comparatively few of these figures survive intact in Western collections, the history of their considerable impact on the European stage can be enlarged upon with the aid of the documentary record.