Early Āndhradeśa: Historical Studies around the Epigraphic Corpus

Volume 1 of 2. This two-volume work highlights the central importance of the Āndhra region in the political, cultural, and religious history of early South Asia. It results from a decade-long project undertaking to document, inventory, and edit anew a body of over a thousand inscriptions, many of which never duly assessed as historical documents, and many unpublished to this day. The first volume presents the first ever attempt at a systematic inventory of this tragically dispersed corpus. The eleven essays gathered in the second volume, written by prominent philologists, epigraphists, art historians, and ancient historians of India, make elaborate use of the presently available evidence and put forward new perspectives on a great variety of sources, shedding fundamental new light on issues of power, patronage, and religious pluralism in the early historic and early medieval Deccan.Contributors are: Stefan Baums, Shailendra Bhandare, Christine Chojnacki, Max Deeg, Emmanuel Francis, Valérie Gillet, Mekhola Gomes, Arlo Griffiths, Petra Kieffer-Pülz, Andrew Ollett, Akira Shimada, Upinder Singh, Ingo Strauch, Vincent Tournier, and Peter Zieme