A Note on Transliteration and Dates
A work dealing with sources in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman and Chaghatay Turkish must necessarily be subject to uneasy compromises in the matter of transliteration. The convention among Ottomanists to transliterate personal names according to the rules of modern Republican Turkish has been followed for names in an Ottoman context, although final voiced consonants are preserved (thus Ahmed not Ahmet or Aḥmed). Similarly, vowel length is not usually marked for Ottoman terms and names. However, among specialists in Chaghatay/Eastern Turkish as well as Timurid and Mughal history the preference seems to be to mark vowel length and diacritics on consonants, so names from an Eastern Turkish context are fully transliterated (thus, Ḥusayn Bāyqarā, not Hüseyin Baykara). However, names well known in a specific English form, such as Aurangzeb, are rendered thus. While at risk of some inconsistency, the aim has been to render names in a form that will be readily recognisable. Arabic and Persian are transliterated according to the system recommended by the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For Sanskrit and other Indian languages, the preferences of individual authors have been maintained.
Dates are rendered in AD/CE form, expect where a hijri date is specifically referred to in a source, where it is given first.