A Note on the Format of Foreign Names

Arabic names. The more common Arabic names (e.g. Abdullah, Ali, Amr) and the names of prominent individuals (e.g. caliphs) are indexed in their Arabic form; other names, mainly drawn from Greek texts, are indexed in a Greek form, with the Arabic name, where known, recorded in the article and also under variant names. For technical reasons, names pre-fixed by 'al-' are indexed under the first letter 'a' and not under the first letter of the second (and principal) element of the name; ayn (`) and hamza (') are only used inside a name; and no diacriticals are given. The older spelling of Omar and Othman instead of Umar and Uthman has been adopted.

Slavonic names. The transliteration of Slavonic names follows the system adopted in the New Catalogue of the Library of Congress.

Dates in Theophanes Confessor, Chronographia.  Theophanes's Chronographia is an annalistic (year-by-year) account, dated from Creation, whence AM = anno mundi ('year of the world'). PBE cites the text by the AM numbers. These are behind the indiction dates (generally assumed by scholars to be more accurate) by one year from AD 603 to at least AD 659 (and possibly for subsequent years down to AD 714), and also for the period from AD 727 to AD 774. The AD dates in PBE I have been 'corrected' accordingly. For the AD equivalent of an AM date, subtract 5492 from the AM date; the dates given in C.A. Mango and R. Scott, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (Oxford, 1997) are the 'uncorrected' dates; see Mango and Scott, pp. xi-xii and lxiv-lxvii. The actual dating of many events recorded in Theophanes remains open to debate, even when apparently precise dates are given in Arabic or Syriac sources (whose reliability may also be suspect).


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