VMs: Siyaqat...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I (finally) got to the British Library yesterday, and had a look at most of 
their books on siyaqat  (Ottoman court shorthand, dating from the mid-15th 
Century). Without a doubt, the undisputed king of the heap is Lajos Fekete 
- as Dr Colin Heywood indicated before, Fekete's 1955 work is a "monument 
of scholarship of a quality that is now hard to find".

Hungary was for years (centuries?) a bastion of the Ottoman empire in 
Europe, and Fekete's studies started from the large numbers of Ottoman 
documents within the Budapest archives - but his research broadened out 
from there, culminating in his 1955 "Die Siyaqat-Schrift in der turkischen 
Finanzverwaltung" masterwork.

It's in German in two volumes - volume 1 has an introductory section, 
followed by transcriptions (and translations) of siyaqat from several 
centuries (AIUI, siyaqat continued to be actively used until the Crimean 
War, and is still occasionally used today). It uses a kind of Arabic 
numbering (see chapter 1.4's "Die Siyaqat-Zahlzeichen"), is typically 
written in a fairly upright (almost humanistic) hand - but is recognisably 
rooted in an Arabic tradition, is used almost exclusively for accounting 
purposes, his its own idiosyncratic layout rules (for accountability and 
clarity), and is not directly connected with the VMS.

Still, the first document Fekete cites (they're meticulously arranged in 
ascending date order) is from Edirne (which was the capital of the Ottoman 
Empire before Istanbul fell in 1453) from 1481-1486 (Nikola Popov's tiny 
Russian 1955 monograph shows some siyaqat from 1451-1452), so the dating is 
a plausible match.

However, because my German is somewhat limited, I was only able to get an 
idea from the Popov book (it includes a French translation) of how siyaqat 
actually works. The name itself appears to come from the phrase "siyaq ve 
sebaq", which Popov translates as "suivants ou précédents".

	En d'autre terms, le dechiffrement des mots réparés écrits en siyaqat
	devient possible en établissant au préalable la signification des
	expressions précédentes ou suivantes.

That is, you can only understand what any given siyaqat letter denotes 
given the context you find it in. Fekete also gives large vocabulary lists, 
which almost invariably appear to be heavily abbreviated.

However, I take this as an indication of what ideas were in the air at the 
time, rather than as a specifically causal chain lining it to the VMs per 
se. So - siyaqat is extremely interesting, but is (I'm 99% certain) 
unconnected to the VMs. :-(

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list