A (very) unsystematic look at Borobudur reliefs as a source for military history

A long, long time ago in a village far, far away, I visited Borobudur — the massive 8th/9th-century Buddhist temple in Central Java — and, like a good tourist, I took pictures.

But I was (and still am) not much good at taking touristy pictures like normal functional people with a real life, so I ended up taking photographs of relief panels that caught my interest due to their potential use as reference for a study of early Javanese military equipment. These pretty much all came from the four tiers of the Rupadhatu zone, containing tales from the Avadana, Jataka, Lalitavistara, and Gandavyuha cycles. However, I’m not that familiar with Buddhist literature so I didn’t understand the narrative and liturgical context of each individual relief when I took the pictures, and moreover I sorted them afterwards by military subject in a manner that thoroughly scrambled the original narrative order beyond all recognition. So I’m pretty much forced to follow this order I foolishly imposed so many years ago upon the pictures and forego any attempt at a more systematic and contextual presentation.