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How Many Died Defending the Somnath Temple in 1026?

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Open Question

Turko-Persian chronicles written after the fact give a formulaic figure of tens of thousands killed defending the temple, which Thapar's historiographical study reads as a rhetorical convention repeated across several unrelated conquest narratives of the period rather than a count, and contemporary Sanskrit and Jain inscriptions from Saurashtra do not corroborate it or even mention the raid.

What would resolve this Independent corroborating evidence from the Saurashtra region itself, archaeological or epigraphic, of a kind that is entirely absent from the record as it stands, or a named modern historian's reasoned estimate in place of the chronicle's formulaic figure.
OpenMedieval South Asian history; Indology; epigraphyRomila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History
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Question On

Thapar's Somanatha identifies the chronicle death figure as a formulaic convention with no corroborating Sanskrit or Jain source.

Source Somanatha: The Many Voices of a HistoryRomila Thapar
Sources
Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History
Romila Thapar, Penguin / Verso, 2004View the Source
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