Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (3 page)

BOOK: Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present

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I would have made many more mistakes without the help of my teachers, colleagues, students, and friends. I am especially grateful to Peter Golden and Cynthia King, who not only read the entire manuscript carefully and offered many comments and corrections, but also suggested numerous significant improvements and spent a great deal of time discussing problems of detail with me. I am deeply indebted as well to Ernest Krysty, who very kindly calligraphed the Old English text of the epigraph to,
chapter 4
and the Tokharian text of the epigraph to
chapter 6
. In addition, I would also like to thank Christopher Atwood, Brian Baumann, Wolfgang Behr, Gardner Bovingdon, Devin DeWeese, Jennifer Dubeansky, Christian Faggionato, RonFeldstein, Victoria Tin-bor Hui, György Kara, Anya King, Gisaburo N. Kiyose, John R. Krueger, Ernest Krysty, Edward Lazzerini, Wen-Ling Liu, Bruce MacLaren, Victor Mair, Jan Nattier, David Nivison, Kurban Niyaz, David Pankenier, Yuri Pines, Edward Shaughnessy, Eric Schluessel, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, Kevin Van Bladel, and Michael Walter for their generous help, ranging from reading all or part of the manuscript or discussing various topics I treat in it to giving advice or providing answers to particular questions. Despite all their advice, which I have sometimes not heeded, probably unwisely, I am sure that I have committed errors of fact or interpretation or omission. I hope that other scholars will point them out so they can be corrected in any future revised edition. In any case, I am ultimately responsible for any mistakes or misinterpretations that remain. In particular, I would like to say that because this book is intended to revise the received view of Central Eurasia and Central Eurasians, I have often had to point out what I believe to be errors in the works of many scholars—and I include myself among those who have at one time followed one or another old view that I now consider to be wrong—but this does not mean I do not respect their learning. Specialists in Central Eurasian history have produced many fine works of scholarship. I could not have written anything without the help of all the scholars who have worked on the topics treated in this book before me, and I am grateful to them for their contributions.
¹

Most of all I thank my wife, Inna, for her support and encouragement. To her I dedicate this book.

¹The final manuscript of this book was finished and accepted by the publisher in 2007. After it was finished I learned of numerous publications, some recent and some old, which either I had overlooked or I had known about but was unable to obtain by that time. In a very few cases where I felt corrections had to be made on the basis of new information, I managed to make minor additions or changes before the copyediting process was finished in spring 2008, but in general I was unable to take most of the new publications into account, and have therefore omitted them from the bibliography, which is intended to include only works I have cited. Accordingly, some highly relevant new works, such as David W. Anthony’s book
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
(Princeton, 2007), are not discussed or cited. I regret that I have not been able to take into account and cite all of the important works by so many excellent scholars that have come to my attention since the manuscript was finished.

ABBREVIATIONS AND SIGLA

Bax.	William H. Baxter. A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992.
CAH	I.E.S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, and N.G.L. Hammond, eds. The Cambridge Ancient History. Vol. I, part 2: Early History of the Middle East. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
CS	Ling-hu Te-fen. (Chou shu). Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1971.
CTS	Liu Hsü et. al. (Chiu T’ang shu). Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1975.
CUP	Henricus Denifle. Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis. Paris, 1899. Reprint, Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1964.
E.I. ₂	H.A.R. Gibb et al., eds. The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New ed. Leiden: Brill, 1960–2002.
EIEC	J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams, eds. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997.
GSE	Great Soviet Encyclopedia: A Translation of the Third Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1973–1983.
HS	Pan Ku et al. (Han shu). Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1962.
HHS	Fan Yeh. (Hou Han shu). Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1965.
HTS	Ou-yang Hsiu and Sung Ch’i. (Hsin T’ang shu). Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1975.
HYC	Hsüan Tsang. Ta T’ang Hsi yü chi.
MChi	Middle Chinese.
NMan	New Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese).
OChi	Old Chinese (unperiodized reconstruction).
PIE	Proto-Indo-European.
Pok.	Julius Pokorny. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. I. Band. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1959.
Pul.	Edwin G. Pulleyblank. Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991.
q.v.	quod vide (which see).
SKC	Ch’en Shou. (San kuo chih). Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1959.
Sta.	Sergei A. Starostin. . Moscow: Nauka, 1989.
Tak.	Tokio Takata. : (A Historical Study of the Chinese Language Based on Dunhuang Materials). Tokyo: Sôbunsha, 1988.
TCTC	Ssu-ma Kuang. (Tzu chih t’ung chien). Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1956.