Early Āndhradeśa: Historical Studies Around the Epigraphic Corpus: Volume One: Introduction and Inventory

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to document, inventory, and edit anew a body of over a thousand inscriptions, many of which never duly assessed as historical documents, and many unpublished to this day.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

Arlo Griffiths, Ph.D. (2004), Leiden University, is Professor of Southeast Asian History at the École française d’Extrême-Orient. His work on the social and religious past of South and Southeast Asia focuses on the scholarly documentation and editing of primary sources in the form of manuscripts and inscriptions, in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other languages.
Vincent Tournier, Ph.D. (2012), École pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), is Professor of Classical Indology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He has published on the history of Buddhist communities, doctrines, and scriptures across the Indian subcontinent, and the epigraphy of the Deccan.
Akira Shimada, Ph.D. (2006), University of London, is Professor of History at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He has published on the history of early Buddhist art and architecture in Andhra, including Early Buddhist Architecture in Context: The Great Stupa at Amaravati (ca. 300 BCE-300 CE), Brill, 2013.