Information about the Mongols in Syriac is found in chronicles, exegetical works, poems, colophons, and marginal notes on manuscripts and inscriptions, from southeastern Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Iran, the territories of the Ilkhans, the lands of both the Syrian Orthodox (or West Syrian) Church and the Church of the East (East Syrian). The Mongols are first mentioned in a chronicle referring to 1218/1219 as “Huns” and “Tatars,” as the destroyers of Persia. The chapters on the history of the Mongols in the chronicles of Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) depend directly on Juwaynī’s work; more original insights are found in poetry, colophons, and inscriptions. In general, the Syriac sources inform us about the feelings and attitudes of Syriac people towards the Mongols, and their policy towards religions. In this respect and from the perspective of social and economic history, the History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma offers most valuable original data.

Accounts of religious beliefs are often based on the assumption that these constitute a special domain, with cognitive processes of acquisition and communication that would be different from other domains of belief. Against this, I argue that religious beliefs are only a special class of meta-represented or reflective beliefs. The contents of religious beliefs are not unified, either, as there is a stark contrast between the beliefs conveyed by doctrinal, organized religious traditions and those found in small-scale, pragmatic traditions aimed at palliating misfortune. These conceptual clarifications make it possible to provide a better account of the transmission of religious beliefs and their effects, including their use as coalitional signals.

The longue durée of Bangladesh history is closely linked to the movement of several frontiers. Agriculture gradually replaced the rainforest to create highly productive economies based on rice cultivation on rich delta soils. States first emerged in the south and west and, over time, also in the east. A moving religious frontier slowly incorporated local religions into larger creeds, notably Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. And a language frontier pushed many local languages to the margins as a result of the rise of Indo-European languages that, by the tenth century CE, would morph into the Bengali language.