the SHADOW of GOD: How a Brotherhood Slaves Forged First Sultanate Delhi, 11751290

Author's Note The diagrams, charts, genealogies, and maps in this book are interpretive and, in several cases, deliberately schematic or illustrative rather than precise. Where they present quantitative figures - army strengths, territorial extent, revenue flows, the intensity of Mongol pressure - those figures are, except where they reproduce a specific chronicle claim for the purpose of criticising it, conservative modern reconstructions or notional indices designed to convey proportion and relationship rather than exact measurement, for the reasons set out at length in the chapters on the problem of numbers and on the sources. They are offered as aids to understanding the shape of the history, not as a spurious quantification of a past that did not measure itself. The genealogical, administrative, and lineage diagrams represent relationships and structures as the best current scholarship understands them, simplified for clarity. The reader should treat every chart as an argument made visible, not as a data table, and should weigh it with the same critical attention that the text asks be brought to the chronicles themselves.