To browse Academia. Historians tend to become anxious over the issue of transliteration. In a book such as this one that draws on primary sources written in different languages, it is not possible to have a consistent rule on proper names.
As a matter of personal preference, I use Genghis Khan, Trotsky, Gaddafi and Teheran even though other renditions might be more accurate; on the other hand, I avoid western alternatives for Beijing and Guangzhou. Places whose names change are particularly difficult.
I refer to the great city on the Bosporus as Constantinople up to the end of the First World War, at which point I switch to Istanbul; I refer to Persia until the country's formal change of name to Iran in I ask for forbearance from the reader who demands consistency. Other great centres of civilisation such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Akkad in Mesopotamia were famed for their grandeur and architectural innovation.
One Chinese geographer, meanwhile, writing more than two millennia ago, noted that the inhabitants of Bactria, centred on the Oxus river and now located in northern Afghanistan, were legendary negotiators and traders; its capital city was home to a market where a huge range of products were bought and sold, carried from far and wide.
It is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. Standing here opened up new ways to view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa, where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in the horse markets of northern India.
