The Successors of Genghis Khan - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

PREFACE
to provide a detailed commentary on the Turkish and Mongol words
and expressions in which the Jami' al-Tawarikh abounds. For fuller
information on these terms the reader is referred to Doerfer's volumes,
while such Turkish and Mongol words as are retained in the English
text are explained in the Glossary (see pp. 339-41), which likewise
includes a number of Islamic terms of Persian and Arabic origin. No
work has been of greater assistance in my researches than Pelliot's
posthumous Motes on Marco Polo, in which frequent references are made
to Blochet's text of Rashid al-DIn and much new light is thrown upon
the historical and geographical problems common to the two authors.
On such problems I have been able once again, as with my earlier
translation, to consult Professor Francis W. Cleaves, Professor of Far
Eastern Languages in Harvard University; I also received much help
from Dr. Igor de Rachewiltz, Senior Fellow in the Department of Far
Eastern History of the Australian National University, Canberra, who
kindly interpreted for me several passages from the Yuan shih. I am
deeply grateful to these two scholars for giving me access to a source
which is still for the most part a closed book to all but Sinologists.
Arabic and Persian names are spelled in the translation in accordance
with the system of the Royal Asiatic Society; Turkish and Mongol
names, on the other hand, are spelled as far as possible in accordance
with the phonetic laws of those languages with their more complicated
vowel system: 6 and u are pronounced as in German (French eu and a)
and i as the Russian hi (Polish y). Rashid al-Dln's spelling of Chinese
names and terms, reflecting as it does the Mongol pronunciation of
13th-century Mandarin, is retained in the text, but the Wade-Giles
orthography is adopted in the footnotes except for modern placenames,
which appear in the more familiar Post Office transcriptions,
for example, Siangyang rather than Hsiang-yang and Fukien rather
than Fu-chien. Corrupt spellings are indicated in the footnotes by the
same alphabet of capital letters as in the History of the World-Conqueror.
As in that work, Arabic phrases and passages in the original are indicated
by the use of italics.
In abridging the titles of works of references, I have in general had
recourse to one or the other of two systems: either the author's name is
followed by the year in which the book or article was published, for
example, Cleaves 1952, Jahn 1969, or, especially in the case of works
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