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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND NAMES

If there is one point I would hope readers might take away from this book, it is the commonality of human experience among great diversity. That diversity includes languages and scripts, and thus the names of peoples, things, and places. The roman script is very much in the minority along the Silk Road, and the transliteration of languages into the roman script—romanization—while necessary for a book written in English and intended for many readers, can obscure this diversity. Except where words are in common English usage, I have deliberately retained diacritics/accents for languages that cannot be transcribed using the meager twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet in order to try to impart something of the richness of the languages of the Silk Road.

For many scripts there are accepted romanization systems and I have used these for Chinese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan (pinyin, the IAST/ISO 15919 convention, and the Wylie system respectively). There is no standard transliteration for Turkic, and I have followed the advice of colleagues as to accepted current practice or common usage. For Arabic and Persian I have followed the systems used by the online versions of the Encyclopedia of Islam (http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2) and the Encyclopaedia Iranica (www.iranicaonline.org/) respectively. I am not a linguist and I apologize for the mistakes that are certain to have crept in despite my—and my editor’s—best efforts.

Consistency is difficult for the names of archaeological sites, towns, regions, countries, and political entities. I use contemporary names where possible or meaningful, but in some case historical accuracy has been sacrificed to clarity and then names are necessarily anachronistic.

MAP 1. Silk Roads by land and sea across Afro-Eurasia. For detail of area marked, see maps 5 and 6.

MAP 2. Silk Roads by land in central and East Asia with places discussed in Chapter 1.

MAP 3. Silk Roads across Asia with places discussed in Chapter 2.

MAP 4. Silk Roads by land and sea in West Asia with places discussed in Chapter 3.

MAP 5. Detail of Silk Road in Central Asia with places discussed in Chapter 4.

MAP 6. Silk Roads by land in Central Asia with places discussed in Chapter 6.

MAP 7. Silk Roads by land and sea linking Europe, North African and West Asia, with places discussed in Chapter 7.

MAP 8. Silk Roads by land through central Asia with sea routes to in South and East Asia with places discussed in Chapter 9.