In this work, the electronic, structural, elastic, and thermodynamic properties of Ti 2 AX MAX phases (A ¼ Al or Ga, X ¼ C or N) were investigated using density functional theory (DFT). It is shown that the calculations of the electronic, structural, and elastic properties of these structures, using local density approximation (LDA) and generalized gradient approximation (GGA) coupled with projected augmented-wave (PAW) pseudopotentials, agree well with experiments. A thermodynamic model, which considers the vibrational and electronic contributions to the total free energy of the system, was used to investigate the finite-temperature thermodynamic properties of Ti 2 AX. The vibrational contribution was calculated using the supercell method, whereas the electronic contribution resulted from one-dimensional integration of electronic density of states (DOSs). To verify the model, the specific heats of pure elements were calculated and compared to experimental data. The DFT-D2 technique was used to calculate the heat capacity of graphite, taking into account the van der Waals (vdW) effect. Good agreement between the calculations and experiments for the specific heats of graphite and other pure elements lends validity to the approach used. The calculated results for the specific heats of Ti 2 AlC and Ti 2 AlN match well with experimental data. These strengthen the results of specific heats of Ti 2 GaC and Ti 2 GaN as well as other calculated thermodynamic properties, including the energies of formation and thermal expansion coefficient.

No abstract

This article examines a crucial phase of Indo-Persian literary modernity, beginning in the late sixteenth century CE, when poets and other literati across South, Central, and West Asia began articulating an unprecedented break with their cultural past through calls for 'speaking the fresh' (tāza-gū'ī). In later, nineteenth-and twentieth-century scholarship, this period of literary ingenuity has been almost universally decried as decadent and unworthy of serious study, an indictment that has, over the years, become specifically and explicitly coded in terms of India's allegedly debilitating effect on Persian language and literature. Thus in scholarly parlance this era is regularly (and pejoratively) referred to as that of the 'Indian Style' (sabk-i hindī), despite the fact that the early modern poets themselves never used such metageographical terminology, and despite the tāza-gū'ī movement's incontrovertibly transregional reach and cosmopolitan tenor. To interrogate this conceptual slippage, this article historicizes some key factors in the twentieth-century formulation of the notion of sabk-i hindī, and then contrasts them with evidence from a case study of the celebrated Mughal munshī and litterateur, Chandar Bha¯n Brahman (d. 1672 -3), whose sense of literary possibility and the interconnectedness of the early modern world are clearly at odds with the nationalist frames of later Iranian (and even Indian) thinkers. After using Chandar Bha¯n's example as a barometer for calling into question much of the modernist discourse about Safavid-Mughal literary and political culture, I offer a brief pre´cis of some suggestive comparative possibilities that could open up if we were to abandon the anachronistic sabk-i hindī model and return our attention to the poetics of ingenuity and 'freshness' (ta¯zagī) that were of central concern to the early modern Indo-Persian literati themselves.

This article aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship on the cultural world of the early modern Indo-Persian state secretary, or munshī. Our guide will be the celebrated Mughal munshī, Chandar Bhān Brahman (d. 1662-63), whose life and career shed considerable light on the ideals of administrative conduct that informed political and intellectual culture during the reigns of the emperors Jahāngīr and Shāh Jahān. After examining Chandar Bhān's background and socio-intellectual milieu, we will focus in particular on a section of his prose magnum opus, Chahār Chaman (_The Four Gardens’), which served as both a memoir of his career in Mughal service and a didactic guide for exemplary ministerial theory and practice, or wizārat. Chandar Bhān's ideal wazīr, embodied by ministers like Afzal Khān Shirazi (d. 1639), Sa’d Allāh Khān (d. 1656), and Raghūnāth Rāy-i Rāyān (d. 1664), was not only tolerant and humane in the exercise of power, but also an expert in the secretarial arts in his own right, and a model of civility (akhlāq) and mystical awareness (ma’rifat) for others. In modern historiography such virtues tend to be primarily associated with Akbar's court, but at least in Chandar Bhān's eyes, they continued to have lasting relevance throughout the Mughal seventeenth century.

The concept of ṣulḥ-i kull is well known as a core feature of the Mughal Empire's state ideology, one that made it, comparatively speaking, arguably the most tolerant and inclusive state in the entire early modern world. Often translated as “peace with all,” the term has become almost synonymous in South Asian historiography with the policies of religious pluralism promoted by the dynasty's most celebrated emperor, Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar “the Great” (r. 1556–1605) and his famed courtier and biographer, Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak (1551–1602). Surprisingly enough, however, despite its ubiquity in discussions of Mughal attitudes toward religious and cultural pluralism, a comprehensive intellectual history of the term ṣulḥ-i kull does not, in fact, appear to have ever been attempted. It is often taken for granted that ṣulḥ-i kull was the obvious term to express the ethos of civility, universal reason, and inclusiveness that Akbar wanted to promote. But why did Akbar and Abu al-Fazl choose this term, specifically? What exactly did they mean by it? And how was the term actually understood in practice, not just in Akbar's era but also in the subsequent decades and indeed centuries? These are the kinds of questions this article seeks to address.