The Lord of the Elephant from the Mrauk U Period of Arakan

The Lord of the Elephant: Interpreting the Islamicate Epigraphic, Numismatic, and Literary Material from the Mrauk U Period of Arakan (ca. 1430−1784) was written by Thibaut d’Hubert.The kingdom of Arakan constituted a frontier region in whichseveral literary languages were used in a variety of official
documents. The contrasting interpretations of the Perso-Arabic titles of Buddhist kings that are found in inscriptions and literary sources invite us to revisit this corpus of texts and try to provide some comprehensive account of the evolution of the signifi cance of those idioms and the rhetoric they entail. In the multilingual context of Arakan, languages are hardly representative of parallel, self-contained cultural domains; rather they complete one another by assuming specific functions within the framework of the complex literate environment of the kingdom’s upper social strata. On the other hand, one should not overlook the fact that each language addresses specifi c socio-textual communities that are the targets of such public utt erances. Our recently improvedunderstanding of premodern society in Arakan—and of therhetoric of the texts produced during the Mrauk U period (ca.1430−1784)—allows for a recontextualization of epigraphic evidence.