John Andrew Boyle


John Andrew Boyle was a British historian, accomplished linguist, and Oriental scholar.

Life and career

John was born at Worcester Park, Surrey, England, on 10 March 1916. His father, Andrew Boyle edited and translated various works, including Spinoza's Ethics.
In 1933, John won a scholarship to Birmingham University where he graduated with first-class honours in German in 1936. He later pursued the studies of Oriental languages at the Universities of Berlin and Göttingen.
In 1941, he became a sapper. In 1942, he was assigned to the Foreign Office where he remained until 1950.
In 1945 he married Margaret Elizabeth Dunbar. They had three daughters together.
He completed his doctoral dissertation under the guidance of Vladimir Minorsky and went on to receive his doctorate in 1947.
He later became a professor of Persian at Manchester University. During this time, he produced a Persian dictionary and a grammar book of modern Persian. Additionally, he worked on translating and editing histories of Iran. Because of his dedication to the Persian language, he was the only European ever to receive the Iranian order of Sepas.
He died of heart failure on November 19, 1978, at the age of 62.

Books

  • Persian words are romanized in this dictionary.
  • Juvaini stopped working on the original Persian-language text in 1260, leaving it in a disorganized and incomplete state. Mirza Muhammad Qazvini completed the best text and published it in 1937. The 1958 edition is in two volumes. A book review of the 1958 edition was published by The American Historical Review. A revised edition of the Boyle translation was published in 1997.
  • . A review of this book was published in a journal in 1967.
  • Foreword by Ehsan Yarshater; Preface by John Andrew Boyle. This is a translation of Volume 2 of Rashīd's Jami' al-Tawarikh.
  • Foreword by Annemarie Schimmel. The 'Ilāhī-nāma is a 12th century Persian poem.
  • Preface by Owen Lattimore.

    Journal articles

  • Attempts to identify two city names that crop up in the description of Chingis’ Western campaigns. Webpage shows first page preview.
  • D̲j̲uwaynī was a Persian bureaucrat and historian. "Ata-Malik Juvayni" is the spelling of D̲j̲uwaynī's name used in the title of his English Wikipedia article.
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  • Volume 4 is entitled "From the Arab invasion to the Saljuqs"; a PDF of volume 4 is available
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  • Makes some comparisons with the Yuan Shih. An 8-page print book was created from this same Iran-Shinasi journal article, having the same author and title, and published by the Keyan Foundation in 1970.
  • "Una lettera di Ghāzān Khan, il mecenate di Rashīd al-Dīn, indirizzata a papa Bonifacio VIII, datata 12 aprile 1302 e ora custodita nell’Archivio Segreto Vaticano, mostra gli stretti contatti tra l’Ilkhan e il Pontefice suo contemporaneo28."
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- "Mongolia before Genghis Khan: the native tradition", Journal of the Anglo-Mongolian Society 2:1, 60-69.
- "The last barbarian invaders: the impact of the Mongol conquest upon East and West," Memoirs and Proceedings 112, 5-19.
- "The burial place of the Great Khan Ogedei," in 11th PIAC, 45-50.
- "Sites and localities connected with the history of the Mongol empire," in Olon Ulsyn, v. 1, 75-79.
- "The seasonal residences of the Great Khan Ogedei, Central Asiatic Journal 16, 125-131. Also in 12th PIAC, 145-151.
- "Kirakos of Ganjak on the Mongols", Central Asiatic Journal 8, 199-214
- "The summer and winter camping grounds of the Kereit", Central Asiatic Journal 17, 108-110.