The Oirats were key supporters of the Mongol enterprise and helped to bring Chinggis Khan to power. Chinggis and his family intermarried with the royal lineage of the Oirats who were descended from Qutuqa Beki. As these marriages continued throughout Mongol history, descendants of Qutuqa Beki and Chinggis's daughter Checheyigen became key supporters of various successor khanates. In the Ilkhanate of Iran, one of their relatives, Tanggiz Küregen, and his family were intimately connected with the ruling house. The importance of Oirat military support for the Ilkhanid government was to such an extent that he and his descendants were regularly pardoned for treasonous acts. While other elite lineages such as the Juvainīs, the family of Arghun Aqa, and the Chupanids all had had great power and influence, they met violent ends at the hands of their Ilkhanid rulers. Tanggiz and his descendants however, were not only not overly punished for their acts of lèse-majesté, but in fact outlived the Ilkhanid Dynasty itself. This culminated in the government of ʿAlī Pādshāh, who ruled much of the former Ilkhanid realm through a puppet khan for a short period in 1336. This article investigates how Oirat power was both central to the Ilkhanid regime and helped cause its downfall.

The Mahidasht region is a vital cultural sphere on the Great Khorasan Road that has provided substantial evidence for administrative activity, which is considered to be an indicator of economic and political complexity in late prehistoric societies. This article discusses a corpus of bureaucratic artefacts from the site of Tapeh Tyalineh in the Kouzaran plain in the north of Mahidasht, including 52 jar sealings and 12 door sealings. The artefacts were found during the recent surveys conducted by two of the authors at Tapeh Tyalineh after reports were received of illegal diggings at the site by villagers who had used its soil to plaster the roofs of their houses and to level and cultivate their farmland. Tyalineh seal impressions are studied here in terms of style and iconography in order to date the corpus of administrative artefacts. Furthermore, applying a functionalist approach, the artefacts are examined to answer questions regarding the nature and function of the site. The results suggest that the corpus dates to the proto-Elamite era. The significance of the door sealings, as the most important artefact type from Tyalineh, is that at least a part of the site was devoted to administrative affairs, which probably involved holding certain commodities in rather small closed-mouthed jars and then securing them behind locked doors. The administrative technology not only at Tyalineh but also at Chogha Maran and Dehsavar in Mahidasht and Godin VI:1 in Kangavar attest to well-established Early Bronze Age administrative and economic institutions along the Khorasan Road in the Central Zagros, which were involved in interregional commercial interactions.

This article brings together various textual materials relating to the worship of Prajñāpāramitā in mediaeval Monsoon Asia. In particular, it covers sources from South Asia, mainland Southeast Asia (Angkor), maritime Southeast Asia (Java and Bali), and Southern China (Yunnan). The aims of this critical survey are twofold. On the one hand, the article argues for the importance of ritual language within wider discussions on cultural and linguistic cosmopolitanism within and beyond the so-called ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’. These discussions have too often focused on royal epigraphic eulogies, neglecting religious literature. On the other hand, it highlights the key role of Prajñāpāramitā as a protective deity, and the transregional heritage of her invocatory texts. These texts strike one for their traditional choice of imagery and associations, thus reminding of the importance of exoteric traditions within the history of Southeast Asian Buddhism.

The cult of Zhunti 准提/準提 (Sanskrit: Cundī) is a unique religious and cultural phenomenon in China. However, the scholarship devoted to its history has long been dominated by two problematic models—the model of ‘Sinification’, according to which the goddess Zhunti is a Chinese Buddhist deity borrowed from an Indian source, and the ‘evolution’ model that depicts the persistence of the Zhunti cult as a continuous and gradual process. I challenge these views and instead argue that, far from being a foreign transplant, Zhunti is a deity ‘made in China’ and there is no evidence of continuity in the development of the cult from the Liao to Ming–Qing times. To justify these assertions, I re-examine the development of the cult of Zhunti by exploring its vicissitudes throughout history and highlighting the ‘Chinese creations’ that were produced during the process of the making of the goddess Zhunti.