Introduction

The New Islamic Dynasties. A Chronological and Genealogical Manual, itself a much-expanded updated version of a work which had appeared over thirty years previously, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 1996. During the intervening twelve years, there have inevitably been corrections and additions which could be made to this: new information from inscriptions, coins, freshly edited and printed texts, and so on, appears almost continuously. Until a revised and corrected version of The New Islamic Dynasties as a whole can appear at some future date, it seems useful to give here a new and revised version of an entry, that on the Qarakhanids, for which there has been a particular spate of new information since the opening up of what was formerly Soviet Central Asia and is now a group of five independent Republics stretching almost from the lower Volga to the borders of China. It has also seemed useful to include tables of some lines of rulers in the Siberian steppes during the period from the Mongol invasions to the gradual incorporation of the Siberian lands into the Russian Empire, that is the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries AD, although the hard historical information on these nomadic lines is often sparse and not infrequently contradictory. Hence it is accordingly difficult to formulate coherent and fully reliable lists of rulers within these families and dynasties, and to give watertight dates; the results given below should therefore be regarded as to some extent interim ones.