India

A widely repeated legend has two Rajput warriors' statues honouring their loyalty to Akbar, but a modern historian traced the story back only as far as a Dutch chronicle written decades after the event it claims to describe.

A scholar who may have arrived in Ghazni as a prisoner of the sultan who conquered his homeland went on to write the most even-handed medieval account of India that survives, sponsored by the same military campaigns that made study of it possible.

Almost everything vivid about Ashoka's life comes from Buddhist legends written centuries later; his own edicts, the only contemporary evidence, say far less.

The institutions he built outlasted the specific decisions, from Kashmir to the 1962 war with China, that historians now judge far more harshly than his contemporaries did.

Its main surviving account comes from a monk who broke his own country's travel ban to get there, and whose reliable observations sit mixed in with tales scholars regard as legend.

Nur Jahan was the only Mughal empress to have coins struck in her own name, a real and unusual mark of power that later chroniclers then padded with achievements a modern historian has called beyond all realistic possibility.

2004

2015

Deciphered in the 1830s, the emperor's own carved words went unattributed to him for another eighty years until one inscription finally named its author.

Historians still cannot agree whether the 1943 Bengal famine came from an actual shortage of rice or from wartime policy distributing a barely reduced supply catastrophically, and the death toll swings by a factor of five depending which you accept.

1600

1857

One emperor's tax records survive well enough that historians still argue, streets and centuries later, whether Mughal cities were more or less urbanised than Europe's.

1947