Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. Due to the large number of transliterated/accented words, no attempt was made to check spelling in this eBook.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained; occurrences of inconsistent hyphenation have not been changed.

Transcriber has attempted to show macrons, `ayns, and hamzas as they were printed in the source book, using the accent grave (`) to represent `ayn, and the accent acute (´) to represent hamza. However: as with English words, when there was a predominant transliterated spelling, with or without such marks, variants were changed to match them. All-caps words, such as the ones in headings and illustration captions, generally were unmarked in the source book, but are shown here with the marks.

Frequent occurrences of variants of some words were retained here, including:

`Othman, `Othman;
`Irak, Irak;
Islam, Islam;
Bokhara, Bokhara, Bokhara.

Illustrations have been moved to fall between paragraphs, so the page numbers in the List of Illustration do not always correspond to the positions in this eBook. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the links lead directly to the correct illustrations.

Footnotes originally began on the same pages as the text that referred to them. In this eBook, the footnotes have been collected together, renumbered sequentially, and moved to just precede the Index.

Index not systematically checked for proper alphabetization, correct page references, or spelling that matched the referenced text. When spelling differences were found between Index entries and the referenced text, the Index was changed to match the text.

Index referenced footnotes by the page numbers on which they appeared. The footnotes have been moved to the end of this eBook, but those references still are to their original pages.

Page 48: Unmatched opening quotation mark before “the efforts”.

Page 102 (footnote): “Abdullah” was printed that way; all other occurrences in the book were printed as “`Abdullah”.

Page 124: “Leignitz” was printed that way in the text and the Index.

Page 131: Date errors. The Christian year “1063” was converted incorrectly: it should be 1073. Later in the same paragraph, the A.H. date “446” is a typographical error for “466”.

Page 193: The Geneaolgy chart originally appeared on page 190, but was moved to the end of the chapter so that it would not interrupt the flow of the narrative. Consequently, all Index references to page 190 will be found at the bottom of page 193 (the links have been adjusted to do this).

Page 215: “western frontier” may be a misprint for “eastern frontier”.

Page 371: “bibliophils” was printed that way.