a The people in this region today, the Basque people, are genetically distinct from all other Europeans in their high incidence of Rh-negative blood. Their language is also distinct, suggesting that they may be the descendants of the first Homo sapiens in Europe who vanquished Neanderthals before other Homo sapiens people moved in from the Middle East.
b Terminology regarding this area is not consistent. The Near East is used to refer to areas bordering, or nearly so, the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. This would include the modern territories of Turkey, Cypress, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. The Middle East can refer solely to countries bordering the Persian Gulf: today’s Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states on the Arabian Peninsula. But news commentators today use Middle East to include the Near East as well as the Gulf states. A term also widely used by historians is the Fertile Crescent, referring to an arc of land that runs northward from parts of modern Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, curves eastward along the border of Turkey and Syria, then turns south along the Zagros Mountains on the borders of Iran and Iraq. I use Middle East in its broad, inclusive sense, or the Fertile Crescent, as defined here. I use Near East to specify just the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia to refer to just the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys (Fig. 5.2).
c There are at least a dozen systems for transliterating Mongol names; no agreement exists, though there is a trend to use contemporary Mongolian forms. I use the forms most familiar to English readers—i.e., Genghis rather than Chinggis, Karakorum rather than Kharakorum, Kublai rather than Qubilai.