cing girls'. The traditional
numbers cited must not be accepted as historical facts. See V. A.
Smith, 'The History of the City of Kanauj' (_J.R.A.S._, 1908, pp.
767-93).

8. This statement is too general. Benares, Allahabad (Prayag), and
many other important Hindoo cities, were never deserted, and
continued to be populous through all vicissitudes. It is true that in
most places the principal temples were desecrated or destroyed, and
were frequently converted into mosques.

9. The statement is much exaggerated. The Hindoo Rajas who paid
tribute to the Sultans of Delhi often maintained considerable courts
in populous towns.

10. This proposition, which is not true of Southern India at all,
applies only to secular buildings in Northern India. The temples of
Khajuraho, Mount Abu, and numberless other places, equal in
magnificence the architecture of the Muhammadans, or, indeed, that of
any people in the world.

11. The anthor's remarks seem likely to convey wrong notions. Very
few of the capitals of the Muhammadan viceroys and governors were new
foundations. Nearly all of them were ancient Hindoo towns adopted as
convenient official residences, and enlarged and beautified by the
new rulers, much of the old beauties being at the same time
destroyed. Fyzabad certainly was a new foundation of the Nawab Wazirs
of Oudh, but it lies so close to the extremely ancient city of
Ajodhya that it should rather be regarded as a Muhammadan extension
of that city. Lucknow occupies the site of a Hindoo city of great
antiquity.

12. It would be difficult to point out an example of a _Muhammadan_
standing camp which was first converted into an open, and then into a
fortified town.

13. This abstract of the history of the Deccan, or Southern India, is
not quite accurate. The Emperor, or Sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlak,
after A.D. 1325, reduced the Deccan to a certain extent to
submission, but the country revolted in A.D. 1347, when Hasan Gango
founded the Bahmani dynasty of Gulbarga, afterwards known as that of
Bidar. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the kingdom so founded broke up into five, not four,
separate states, namely, Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda, Berar, and
Bidar. The Berar state had a separate existence for about eighty-five
years, and then became merged in the kingdom of Ahmadnagar.

CHAPTER 64

Murder of Mr. Fraser, and Execution of the Nawab Shams-ud-din.

At Palw