A border-crossing kingdom The Karnata polity is best understood as a kingdom whose political geography crossed the modern India–Nepal boundary rather than as a dynasty confined to one present-day national space. Its best-known capital, Simraongarh (Simraungadh), lies in the Nepal Tarai, while its agrarian, religious, intellectual and military field extended southward into the plains of Tirabhukti or Tirhut. The modern frontier therefore cuts through a historical landscape that was connected by roads, river crossings, marriage alliances, landholding networks, pilgrimage, commerce and the movement of scholars. The kingdom’s history belongs simultaneously to the histories of Mithila, north Bihar, Madhesh/Tarai and the Kathmandu Valley, but connection must not be inflated into uniform territorial control over all of those regions. The familiar dynastic sequence beginning with Nānyadeva and ending with Harisiṃhadeva is a scholarly reconstruction assembled from inscriptions, literary works, Nepalese chronicles and genealogical traditions, archaeological evidence and later regional histories. These categories of evidence do not all speak with the same chronological precision. The task is consequently not to make them sound artificially unanimous, but to show where they intersect and where uncertainty remains. This is especially important for the opening date of the dynasty, the rebuilding of Simraongarh’s defences, and the final conquest horizon in the fourteenth century (Sinha 1979; Petech 1984; Salomon 1998). The 1097 horizon and what an inscription can establish The year 1097 CE has long functioned as the conventional beginning of Nānyadeva’s rule. It is useful as a chronological horizon, but it should not be described as though an extant Nānyadeva inscription bears that Gregorian date in an unambiguous modern form. Luciano Petech, reviewing the early chronology in relation to Nepal, noted the traditional chronogram that converts to 18 July 1097 while also observing that the surviving inscription associated with Nānyadeva’s reign and his minister Śrīdhara is undated. The distinction matters: a conventional date can organize discussion without acquiring an evidentiary status it does not possess. Nānyadeva nevertheless marks a genuine transformation in the political history of Mithila. Karnata authority appears in the period when older Pāla-Sena political structures were fragmenting and new regional powers were consolidating across the eastern Gangetic plain. Later genealogy often makes this transition look like the simple founding act of one ruler. A safer reconstruction sees the new court as the successful centre of a broader process: military consolidation, recruitment of chiefs and specialists, control of agricultural revenue, and the selection of a defensible capital near routes connecting the plains and the Himalayan foothills. The title ‘Karnata’ has generated origin narratives, but dynastic labels should not by themselves be treated as proof of a single migration event or a complete ethnic history. Simraongarh as capital and route node Simraongarh was not merely a palace site. Its scale, ramparts, ditches, mounds, sculpture, architectural fragments and dispersed occupation indicate a large fortified landscape whose political value depended on terrain and movement. The site stood close to north–south routes linking the Gangetic plain with the Tarai and approaches to the Kathmandu Valley. East–west movement across Mithila was equally important. Grain, livestock, salt, metal goods, textiles, manuscripts, ritual specialists and soldiers moved through a landscape structured as much by seasonal water and crossing points as by formal roads. A capital of this kind should not be imagined as an isolated walled island. Fortification can protect a court, treasury, stores and elite residence, but it also presupposes a supporting countryside. The city required cultivators, cattle, timber, brick- making, transport labour, markets, artisans and systems for moving produce into the fortified zone. The archaeological remains are therefore most informative when read together with the agrarian and route systems that made concentrated court life possible. This also helps explain why political influence could be strong along selected corridors while remaining negotiated or indirect in peripheral localities. Dharmasvāmin in 1236: a near-contemporary visitor A rare near-contemporary window is supplied by the Tibetan monk and translator Dharmasvāmin (Chag lo tsa ba Chos rje dpal). His biography, translated by George N. Roerich, records journeys in Bihar during the 1230s and places him in the Tirhut region in 1236 on his return north. He became ill, remained for roughly two months near the Karnata capital, and encountered the ruler Rāmasiṃhadeva. The narrative reports gifts and the ruler’s request that the traveller remain as a religious preceptor, which Dharmasvāmin declined. Whatever literary shaping belongs to the biography, the episode is unusually valuable because it derives from the experience of a traveller moving through the region rather than from a much later dynastic list (Roerich 1959). The account also contributes to historical geography. It demonstrates the practicability of movement from the monastic and urban centres of Bihar toward Tirhut and onward to Nepal, and it places a functioning court on that route in the early thirteenth century. Its numbers and descriptions should not be converted mechanically into a cadastral plan, but the account confirms that the Karnata court was visible to trans-Himalayan travellers and capable of receiving them. The same evidence warns against writing the Tarai as a cultural wall between the plains and the valley. Court, scholarship, and political language Karnata Mithila became an important setting for Sanskrit scholarship, juridical writing, musicological knowledge and the development of regional literary expression. Jyotirīśvara Ṭhākura’s Varṇaratnākara, conventionally placed in the early fourteenth century, is especially valuable because its encyclopaedic descriptive method opens onto occupations, social types, spaces, performances and courtly vocabularies that a royal genealogy would omit. It is not a census and should not be mined as one; its literary classifications nevertheless reveal the density of the social and linguistic world in which elite culture operated. Caṇḍeśvara, associated with late Karnata and transitional political conditions, produced major legal and political digests. His Rājanītiratnākara belongs to a long Sanskrit tradition of thinking about kingship while also registering a world in which rulers could exist in hierarchical relationships to greater powers. The significance of such texts is not that they offer a verbatim constitution of Karnata Mithila, but that legal- intellectual labour was part of state formation. Courts needed expertise in gifts, inheritance, ritual status, adjudication, taxation, diplomacy and political precedence. The scholar and the scribe were therefore not ornamental additions to the military state; they helped define and document authority. Literary production also complicates a simple Sanskrit- versus-vernacular story. Elite learning remained deeply Sanskritic while descriptive, performative and regional registers expanded. This book distinguishes the earlier Mahākavi Vidyāpati of the Maithili Padāvalī tradition from the later Oiniwar-period Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura of the Sanskrit and Avahaṭṭa corpus. Neither literary horizon arose from an intellectual vacuum: both belong to longer institutions, genres and performance networks already visible before and during the Karnata centuries (Mishra 1949; Choudhary 1976; Thakur, ‘Two Vidyapatis,’ Videha 438). Agrarian revenue, households, and delegated power The concentration of courtly life at Simraongarh depended on agrarian surplus, but the surviving sources do not provide a complete revenue manual. Political economy must therefore be reconstructed from landholding practices, donation traditions, later legal compilations, settlement geography and comparison with neighbouring regions rather than from imaginary precision. Revenue was rarely a direct transaction between a king and every cultivator. Landed intermediaries, religious establishments, local chiefs, hereditary office-holders, accountants and village-level authorities could all mediate claims on produce, labour or cash. This mediated structure explains why sovereignty can be both impressive and uneven. A ruler may issue commands, support temples and scholars, maintain troops and receive tribute without possessing a uniform bureaucratic presence in every village. Conversely, a local lineage can retain substantial authority while acknowledging a superior court. The most useful unit of analysis is consequently the relationship among court, fortified node, route, landed locality and intermediary rather than a modern map shaded with one undifferentiated colour. Households are also part of political history. Marriage alliances linked elite families; service drew scribes, ritualists and military retainers toward centres of power; market exchange connected producers to consumers inside the capital. Women appear unevenly in the surviving archive, usually through dynastic, religious or property contexts, and this uneven visibility should be acknowledged rather than repaired with invented biographies. Panji traditions: genealogy, memory, and evidence Maithil panji or genealogical traditions became central to the regulation and memory of elite marriage networks, and Anshuman Pandey’s study demonstrates the exceptional historical depth of the genealogical archive. This history nevertheless separates the antiquity of genealogical record- keeping from the age of later ranked sub-caste categories. Regional narratives often associate panji formalization with Karnata or immediately post-Karnata rulers, especially Harisiṃhadeva, but surviving witnesses are layered, copied and reorganized. A medieval genealogy is therefore not by itself proof that every category found in a later branch book existed in the medieval period (Pandey 2014). For this reason, panji material should be used in more than one register at once. It can preserve old lineages, marriage relationships and memories of authority, yet the date of the underlying relationship must be distinguished from the date and classificatory vocabulary of the surviving manuscript. The Sanskrit word śrotriya is ancient as a learned or Veda-connected descriptor; the claim at issue is different: in the Parallel History reconstruction adopted here, Śrotriya as a fixed Maithil Brahmin sub-caste or hereditary rank is not projected backward before about 1800 CE. Claims of a medieval Śrotriya sub-caste are treated as retrospective unless a contemporary witness independently demonstrates that social category. North Bihar, the Tarai, and the Nepal Valley Political and cultural connections with Nepal were structural rather than episodic. The Tarai did not end the political world of Mithila; it formed part of it. Routes through the lowlands linked the Karnata court with passes and valley settlements, while marriage, refuge, religious travel and scholarly mobility created durable ties. Nepalese historical materials preserve memories of Karnata rulers and of Harisiṃhadeva’s movement north after defeat, but these records have their own chronological layers and must be compared rather than harmonized automatically with Mithila genealogies (Petech 1984; Slusser 1982). The long-term consequence was not a single political union of Mithila and the Kathmandu Valley. It was a zone of repeated interaction. Political refugees could carry manuscripts, ritual expertise and courtly practices; valley rulers could recruit specialists from the plains; merchants and pilgrims traversed the same broad corridor. The result is a historical geography in which present national borders are necessary for locating sites but misleading when projected backward as permanent cultural barriers. The present landscape and the problem of visual evidence Modern photographs of Simraongarh are indispensable for documenting the present condition of the site, its shrines, vegetation, settlement and visible archaeological features. They are not photographs of the Karnata capital. Structures standing today may incorporate older fragments, occupy older sacred locations or belong to later phases of rebuilding. Visual evidence must therefore be captioned with dates and rights information and described as evidence of the present archaeological landscape unless a specific architectural phase has been independently established. Figure 3. Ranibas Math and Ram-Janaki Temple at the Simraungadh site, photographed in 2019. This present-day monument belongs to the archaeological landscape but should not be assigned automatically to the Karnata-period urban fabric. Photograph: Gaurav Dhwaj Khadka, 2019. CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons file page Archaeology of the fortified capital The Italian-Nepalese investigations at Simraongarh transformed discussion of the capital by placing stratigraphy beside text. A test trench through the fortifications revealed a technically complex rampart sequence including sand and silt deposits, structural use of organic materials such as bamboo or timber in construction, and fired-brick elements. Crucially, the excavators identified at least two construction phases. That observation is archaeological; the assignment of either phase to a named ruler or military event is not automatically archaeological (Vidale, Balista, and Torrieri 1993). The trench did not yield a neat set of securely datable objects from the rampart cores that would convert the earthworks into a year-by-year military narrative. The excavators therefore treated correlations with textual events cautiously. A phase might be compatible with repairs associated in literary tradition with Rāmasiṃhadeva, and a destruction horizon might be compatible with the Tughluq conquest, but compatibility is not proof. The fortification itself is secure evidence for planning, labour mobilization and defence; the named-event correlation remains a hypothesis until supported by independent dating. This distinction is one of the most important methodological lessons of the site. Archaeology can overturn the temptation to use a chronicle as a label-maker for layers. At the same time, texts can provide hypotheses that archaeology can test. The strongest historical reconstruction keeps both bodies of evidence visible without making either disappear into the other. Diagram 24. Source-controlled Karnata chronology. The graphic separates the conventional 1097 Nānyadeva horizon, Dharmasvāmin’s 1236 visit, the late Karnata court-text horizon, and the 1324–25 Tughluq conquest horizon according to evidentiary weight. Editorial diagram prepared for this book, 2026. Original schematic; no third- party image content. Sources: Petech 1984; Roerich 1959; Sinha 1979; Salomon 1998. Diagram 25. Simraongarh fortification and hydraulic system. Excavation established at least two fortification phases; proposed correlations with Rāmasiṃhadeva’s repairs or a Tughluq destruction event remain hypotheses, not proved event layers. Editorial diagram prepared for this book, 2026. Original schematic; no third- party image content. Sources: Vidale, Balista, and Torrieri 1993; Vidale and Lugli 1997. Harisiṃhadeva and the Tughluq conquest horizon The last major Karnata ruler, Harisiṃhadeva, occupies a prominent place in regional memory because the collapse of his court became a hinge between dynastic eras. Persianate narratives of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq’s eastern campaigns, Nepalese chronicles and Mithila traditions converge on a conquest and displacement horizon around 1324–25, though they differ in detail. It is therefore appropriate to speak of a Tughluq conquest horizon rather than pretend that every stage of the campaign can be plotted from a single synchronized record. Harisiṃhadeva’s reported movement toward Nepal after defeat was consequential for later historical memory and for traditions of learned migration. Yet political defeat did not erase the social and intellectual structures of Mithila. Landholding networks, scribal expertise, ritual institutions and local chiefships survived or were reorganized under new relations of power. The transition to the Oiniwars is best understood against this continuity: the dynasty changed, the scale and external relations of sovereignty changed, but the region did not begin again from zero. From Karnata collapse to Oiniwar transition The decades after the fall of Simraongarh demonstrate why dynastic periodization can conceal as much as it clarifies. Sultanate power could claim conquest or superior authority while local families continued to control land, patronage and juridical expertise. Caṇḍeśvara’s career belongs precisely to this world of transition, and later Oiniwar courts drew on institutions that the Karnata age had helped consolidate. The political problem was no longer simply how to rule a regional kingdom, but how to maintain local authority within a larger field of Delhi, Jaunpur and Bengal power. Chapter 14 therefore begins not with an abrupt restoration of an independent Mithila state, but with reconstituted authority. Its central question is how the Oiniwar rulers, learned lineages, landed intermediaries and Sultanate powers negotiated overlapping claims across the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A dynasty label is not an ethnic map The label ‘Karnata’ is historically real, but it should not be made to carry more information than the sources permit. Dynastic names can recall origin, military affiliation, remembered migration or elite self-description without mapping the ethnicity of an entire population. Mithila under the Karnatas remained a socially diverse agrarian region. The strongest historical claim is therefore that a ruling lineage identified as Karnata established and sustained power in Tirhut; a population-wide migration or cultural replacement would require different evidence. Political inheritance after Pāla-Sena fragmentation The rise of Nānyadeva belongs to a wider eastern Indian transition in which Pāla and Sena authority fragmented unevenly. This context matters because new regional courts did not create their fiscal and sacred landscapes from nothing. Existing settlements, Brahmanical institutions, market routes, local chiefs and agrarian relations could be incorporated, contested or redirected. Karnata state formation was thus both innovative and inherited: new military leadership operated through older social resources while producing a new court centre and new claims to regional kingship. Frontier ecology and strategic choice Simraongarh’s Tarai location made strategic sense because defence and communication were inseparable from ecology. Seasonal water, forest belts, low ridges, river crossings and alluvial surfaces could impede armies while also channeling trade and movement. The site’s value did not come from a timeless ‘natural fortress’; environmental advantages changed with season, maintenance and route use. Historical geography should therefore treat the capital as a managed landscape in which earthworks, water and access were repeatedly adjusted. Routes before modern borders North–south routes connecting the Gangetic plain, the Tarai and Kathmandu approaches existed long before an international boundary divided India and Nepal. The historical problem is to reconstruct corridors of movement, not to project customs posts backward. Dharmasvāmin’s itinerary, Nepalese materials and the location of Simraongarh together show that scholars, religious travellers, envoys and political refugees could cross this zone. The same corridors also moved ordinary commodities whose documentary visibility is much poorer than that of rulers. Capital scale without population arithmetic The physical scale of Simraongarh confirms a major centre, but it does not license a precise medieval population estimate in the absence of settlement-density, household and occupation data. Large enclosures can include gardens, reservoirs, fields, empty defensive spaces and later occupation. Population figures repeated in modern summaries should therefore be treated skeptically unless tied to a transparent archaeological method. Monumental scale is secure evidence for labour mobilization and planning; demographic arithmetic is a separate problem. Earthworks as labour history A rampart is not only a military object. Its construction required quarrying or collecting earth, transporting materials, organizing work teams, coordinating drainage and maintaining slopes after monsoon damage. Archaeological fortifications therefore provide indirect evidence for command over labour. They do not reveal whether that labour was paid, corvée, dependent or supplied through local chiefs in each phase. The safe inference is organizational capacity, not an invented labour code. Brick, timber, bamboo, and construction knowledge The fortification trench is important for its combination of earthen deposits, fired-brick elements and traces interpreted as structural use of organic materials. Such construction reflects knowledge adapted to a wet alluvial environment. Bamboo and timber can reinforce or frame earthwork while brick protects selected surfaces, but organic components decay and complicate archaeological visibility. The surviving wall is therefore only part of the original engineered system, and its present appearance should not be mistaken for the complete medieval design. Water control without a hydraulic-state thesis Ponds, ditches, drains and low-lying channels belong to the defensive and domestic landscape of Simraongarh, yet they do not prove a centralized ‘hydraulic state’. Water features can serve multiple functions: drainage, storage, fishery, ritual use, brick production, defence and seasonal access. Their chronology may also differ. A responsible reconstruction maps relationships among water, settlement and fortification while resisting the temptation to derive an entire political system from the presence of hydraulic works. The court seen by a traveller Dharmasvāmin’s encounter is unusually valuable because it records the court from the perspective of a mobile outsider. His illness, reception and refusal of a religious appointment reveal hospitality, religious patronage and the court’s interest in distinguished specialists. They also remind us that travel texts are selective. A monk notices monasteries, patrons, danger and sacred geography differently from a revenue officer or merchant. The account is strongest when used for encounter and route, not when pressed into a complete description of Karnata administration. Gifts and religious patronage as political communication The gifts reported in the Dharmasvāmin narrative are politically meaningful even without reconstructing their exact monetary value. Courtly generosity displayed status, created obligation and advertised the ruler’s capacity to host learned visitors. Patronage could also recruit ritual prestige. Rāmasiṃhadeva’s reported desire to retain Dharmasvāmin as a preceptor therefore belongs to the politics of expertise as well as religion. The traveller’s refusal shows that such patronage was negotiated rather than automatically effective. Travel time and historical geography Itineraries provide sequences and travel intervals rather than GPS coordinates. Their best use is relational: one can ask which river crossings, plains and upland approaches were encountered in what order, then compare that pattern with known sites. Exact kilometre conversions are risky because route choice, season, illness and transport affect speed. Dharmasvāmin’s evidence places the Karnata court within a functioning transregional corridor without requiring false precision about every stopping place. Rāmasiṃhadeva: repair tradition and archaeological restraint Textual tradition associates Rāmasiṃhadeva with activity at the fortified capital, and this has encouraged attempts to identify one archaeological construction phase as his repair. The Simraongarh excavators explicitly resisted certainty. At least two phases were observed, but the rampart core did not provide the dating evidence necessary to attach a ruler’s name securely. The proposed correlation is useful as a testable hypothesis, not as an excavated fact. Diagram 25 marks it accordingly. Jyotirīśvara’s social catalogue Varṇaratnākara is valuable because its classificatory imagination ranges far beyond kings. It names environments, occupations, performances, social characters and material settings that enlarge the historian’s field of view. Yet literary abundance is not statistical representation. A category appearing in the text proves that it belonged to a repertoire recognizable to the author and intended audience; it does not tell us how numerous its members were. This distinction allows the work to illuminate social history without turning poetry into census data. Varṇaratnākara as genre and evidence Genre governs historical use. An encyclopaedic descriptive work organizes the world through rhetorical convention, inherited lists and local observation. Some details may be closely grounded in the author’s surroundings while others derive from learned tradition. Comparison with inscriptions, archaeology and later Maithili usage can help identify which features have stronger regional purchase. The text is therefore neither a transparent photograph of fourteenth-century Mithila nor merely fiction; it is structured cultural evidence. Caṇḍeśvara and political hierarchy Caṇḍeśvara’s political and legal writings are especially relevant to a period in which regional rulers negotiated hierarchy. Sanskrit political theory could conceptualize kings who were not all equal in power, and it supplied a language for authority, duty, taxation and inter-ruler relations. Such prescriptions cannot be equated mechanically with daily Oiniwar or Karnata administration. They show instead the intellectual resources available to learned officials confronting a world of layered sovereignty. Law books and administrative practice A legal digest gains historical significance when it is placed beside the institutions that needed legal expertise. Land grants, inheritance, ritual eligibility, penance, taxation and dispute resolution all generated documentary and interpretive work. A court jurist’s text may be normative and selective, but the very investment in systematization suggests demand for authoritative reasoning. Later Mithila’s reputation for scholastic law should therefore be connected to administrative practice without imagining a modern codified legal system. Music, performance, and courtly status Karnata court culture included music and performance as forms of expertise and prestige. Musical learning is not politically trivial: performers, theorists and patrons circulated between courts, and ceremonial sound helped stage kingship. Literary references to musicians and entertainers also point toward urban service populations. Their livelihoods depended on patronage and markets that are poorly documented in inscriptions. Court culture thus provides another route from elite texts toward the social history of labour and mobility. Language choice at court Sanskrit retained enormous authority in law, theology and learned composition, but the region’s communicative life was multilingual. Vernacular and Apabhraṃśa-associated registers, oral performance and local scripts coexisted with learned Sanskrit. Language choice followed genre, audience and institution rather than a linear replacement model. This environment helps explain why the following Oiniwar age could support both rigorous Sanskrit scholarship and the political- literary experimentation associated with the later Vidyāpati Ṭhakkura. Cultivators beneath the royal narrative Cultivators appear mostly indirectly in Karnata political history, yet they sustained the surplus on which fortified and courtly life depended. The absence of peasant voices from royal sources is an archival inequality, not evidence that they were politically irrelevant. Crop cycles, flood risk, cattle, irrigation and access to markets shaped the amount of revenue any ruler could actually claim. State power therefore rested on ecological and household processes that dynastic narratives rarely describe. Artisans and military provisioning Fortifications, weapons, transport and court consumption required masons, brick-makers, carpenters, smiths, potters, leather workers and carriers. Archaeology can recover products and debris more readily than names. Military history should consequently include provisioning systems: an army needs food, fodder, repair, carts and animals as much as commanders. Simraongarh’s material scale implies such labour networks even where occupational quarters have not been securely identified. Markets and grain movement A large court created demand that linked surrounding villages to exchange nodes. Grain and fodder had to move in bulk; salt and metals often travelled farther; luxury textiles, ritual goods and manuscripts moved through narrower networks. Route control could therefore generate revenue and strategic leverage. The evidence does not permit a full price series for Karnata Mithila, but economic geography helps explain why a capital near interregional corridors mattered beyond defence. Landed intermediaries and local chiefs Regional kingship depended on people who could convert a royal claim into local compliance. Landholders, chiefs, revenue intermediaries and religious institutions could collect dues, supply troops or labour, and mediate disputes. Their cooperation was never guaranteed. A change of dynasty could therefore be less disruptive in a village than at the royal centre if local intermediaries survived. This institutional continuity is crucial for understanding the rapid reconstitution of authority after the Karnata collapse. Religious endowment and the geography of authority Temple and monastic patronage created durable nodes of political memory. Endowments linked rulers to land, ritual specialists and local communities, while sacred institutions could preserve texts long after dynasties disappeared. Religious patronage should not be interpreted simply as personal devotion or propaganda; it could also stabilize property relationships and service obligations. The surviving evidence is selective, however, and cannot establish equal patronage across all communities. Lineage and matrimonial regulation Elite marriage linked political and scholarly households. Genealogical memory therefore had practical consequences: it could regulate unions, preserve descent claims and provide resources for later ranking. The crucial distinction is chronological. This book accepts medieval roots for panji genealogy while rejecting the automatic back-projection of the later Śrotriya sub-caste classification into Karnata society. The Panji-file reading used by the Parallel History places that ranked sub-caste formation around the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, in the same broad transformation that produced new branch books and estate-era status politics. Medieval genealogy and c.1800 social classification are therefore treated as related but non-identical historical layers. Panji memory and later manuscript layers A panji manuscript copied centuries after the Karnata period can preserve older genealogical information while also reflecting later rearrangement, correction, interpolation and rank-making. Historians must distinguish the date of the remembered ancestor from the date of the surviving witness and from the date at which a classificatory label entered the record. This principle is especially important for Śrotriya. The Panji-based position adopted here places the emergence of Śrotriya as a distinct Maithil Brahmin sub-caste around c.1800, while older uses of śrotriya are read first as descriptors of learning or ritual qualification unless the context proves a hereditary sub-caste. The often-repeated 1600 Śaka/1678 dating is not used as a secure origin date; it conflicts with the late- eighteenth-century Madhav Singh/branch-book horizon invoked by the same tradition and therefore requires primary corroboration. Nepal chronicles and their chronological layers Nepalese chronicles are indispensable for Karnata–Valley connections, especially around Harisiṃhadeva, but they are not contemporary annals in every surviving form. Compilation, copying and dynastic memory shape their narratives. Petech’s critical use of these materials remains important precisely because he compared chronicle traditions with inscriptions and external chronology. A cross-border history should preserve that method rather than cite one late chronicle as if it were a day-by-day record. Refuge and migration after defeat Political defeat often produces movements that are more historically durable than the battle itself. Traditions of Harisiṃhadeva’s northward flight connect the fall of the Karnata court with the movement of families, ritual specialists and political practices toward Nepal. Individual migration claims need source-specific proof, but the broader mechanism is plausible and repeatedly documented in premodern South Asia. Refuge can redistribute expertise without transferring an entire society. Sculpture and reused architectural fragments Sculptural and architectural fragments at Simraongarh show artistic production and sacred investment, but many objects have been moved, reused or recontextualized. Style can suggest chronology, yet stylistic dating should be checked against stratigraphy and inscriptions where possible. A fragment embedded in a later shrine may testify to an older monument without proving that the standing shrine is medieval. Object history therefore includes reuse as well as original manufacture. Present shrines inside an archaeological landscape Ranibas Math and the Ram-Janaki Temple are part of the living landscape of Simraongarh. Their religious importance and visual prominence warrant documentation, but a present monument cannot be assigned wholesale to the Karnata urban fabric without architectural and archaeological demonstration. The retained photograph is dated and captioned accordingly. This is not excessive caution: it prevents modern devotional geography from being mistaken for a frozen medieval site plan. The problem of dating ramparts Earth ramparts are notoriously difficult to date when their fills contain redeposited soil and few diagnostic objects. Material inside an embankment can predate its construction, while later repairs can cut into earlier phases. Secure dating therefore depends on stratigraphic relationships, associated datable contexts and, where possible, scientific samples. Simraongarh’s fortifications show the danger of assigning a wall to a ruler simply because a text mentions construction. Two construction phases: what is secure The most important positive result of the test trench is the recognition of at least two major construction phases. This means the defensive system changed through time and was not built in a single founding moment. Repair, enlargement or redesign are historically plausible. What remains uncertain is which ruler sponsored which phase and how far each excavated sequence can be generalized around the full circuit. Diagram 25 separates this secure stratigraphic observation from event attribution. Fire and destruction do not name an attacker Burning, collapse or abrupt abandonment can be dramatic archaeological evidence, but they do not carry the name of an army. Fire may result from attack, accident, clearance or later disturbance. Even where a destruction layer broadly fits the fourteenth-century conquest horizon, the attribution to Tughluq forces requires independent chronological linkage. The historical narrative therefore uses ‘compatible with’ or ‘hypothesized’ rather than ‘proved by archaeology’. Event history and site-formation history A conquest account asks who attacked whom and when. Site- formation analysis asks how deposits accumulated, walls were repaired, surfaces eroded and materials were reused. The two questions overlap but are not identical. Simraongarh is strongest when both are asked. Political texts propose events; stratigraphy records material processes. Their convergence can strengthen an interpretation, while disagreement or silence should remain visible rather than be edited away. Fortification beyond warfare Walls define access and communicate authority even when no battle occurs. Gates regulate movement; ditches affect drainage; ramparts distinguish protected space; monumental enclosure can stage kingship. Maintenance itself demonstrates recurring organization. The fortification system should therefore be interpreted as an infrastructure of everyday government as well as defence. Its political meaning survived in the landscape even after the Karnata court fell. Harisiṃhadeva in regional memory Harisiṃhadeva became a major figure in later Mithila memory because his reign marked both culmination and rupture. Genealogical, ritual and Nepal-connected traditions attach institutional changes to him. These memories are historically significant, but each claimed reform must be tested independently. The safest conclusion is that his defeat became an organizing memory through which later communities explained migrations, genealogies and the end of the Simraongarh-centred order. Ghiyāth al-Dīn Tughluq and the eastern campaign The Tughluq advance into Tirhut belongs to a broader eastern military programme. Persianate chronicles are indispensable for the imperial perspective but naturally foreground the Sultan’s success. Regional and Nepalese traditions foreground displacement and local aftermath. Reading them together makes conquest visible at more than one scale. It also cautions against assuming that a victorious campaign produced immediate uniform administration across every locality formerly associated with the Karnatas. What survived the conquest The court at Simraongarh could fall while agrarian communities, temples, learned lineages, scribal skills and local property relations continued. This continuity explains why post- conquest Mithila remained capable of supporting sophisticated legal and literary production. Political discontinuity and institutional continuity are not contradictions. They are the central pattern of the transition from Karnata to Oiniwar rule. The transition was a process, not a date 1324–25 is a useful conquest horizon, not a magical dividing line after which every institution changed. Some local authorities may have accommodated the new political order quickly; others may have resisted or fragmented. The Oiniwar rise itself unfolded over decades and is chronologically uncertain. Period labels therefore serve organization, while the prose keeps the slower processes of continuity, negotiation and realignment in view. Methodological conclusions from Simraongarh Simraongarh demonstrates the value of refusing source hierarchy by habit. An inscription can date a royal act but not an entire urban phase; a travel biography can document encounter but not cadastral boundaries; archaeology can establish construction phases without naming their builders; genealogy can preserve social memory without supplying contemporary dates. Historical confidence grows when independent source types converge and should remain graded where they do not. Evidentiary conclusions The Karnata period is securely historical, but its cleanest textbook dates are not uniformly documented. Nānyadeva’s conventional 1097 horizon, Dharmasvāmin’s 1236 encounter, the mature courtly-intellectual record, Simraongarh’s multi- phase fortifications and the 1324–25 conquest horizon belong to different evidentiary categories. The cumulative reconstruction therefore retains uncertainty as information. What emerges is not a weaker history but a more precise account of a border- crossing kingdom whose institutions outlived its dynasty. Chapter-specific bibliography Sinha, Chandreshwar Prasad Narayan. Mithila under the Karnatas, c. 1097- 1325 A.D. Janaki Prakashan, 1979. Petech, Luciano. Mediaeval History of Nepal (c. 750-1482). 2nd ed. Serie Orientale Roma 54. Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1984. Roerich, George N., trans. Biography of Dharmasvāmin (Chag Lo Tsa-ba Chos-rje-dpal): A Tibetan Monk Pilgrim. K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1959. Vidale, Massimo, C. Balista, and V. Torrieri. “A Test Trench Through the Fortifications of Simraongarh.” Ancient Nepal 135 (October-November 1993): 10-21. Vidale, Massimo, and F. Lugli. “Excavations at Simraongarh: The Karnata Phase.” In Nepalese and Italian Contributions to the History and Archaeology of Nepal. IsIAO, 1997, 97-118. Slusser, Mary Shepherd. Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley. 2 vols. Princeton University Press, 1982. Salomon, Richard. Indian Epigraphy: A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages. Oxford University Press, 1998. Mishra, Jayakanta. A History of Maithili Literature, vol. 1: Early and Middle Periods. Tirabhukti Publications, 1949. Choudhary, Radhakrishna. Mithilā in the Age of Vidyāpati. Chowkhamba Orientalia, 1976. Asher, Catherine B., and Cynthia Talbot. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pandey, Anshuman. Recasting the Brahmin in Medieval Mithila: Origins of Caste Identity among the Maithil Brahmins of North Bihar. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2014.