Treasures of knowledge : an inventory of the Ottoman Palace Library (1502/3-1503/4) /
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The subject of this two-volume publication is an inventory of manuscripts in the book treasury of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, commissioned by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II from his royal librarian ʿAtufi in the year 908 (1502-3) and transcribed in a clean copy in 909 (1503-4). This unicum inventory preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Könyvtára Keleti Gyűjtemény, MS Török F. 59) records over 5,000 volumes, and more than 7,000 titles, on virtually every branch of human erudition at the time. The Ottoman palace library housed an unmatched encyclopedic collection of learning and literature; hence, the publication of this unique inventory opens a larger conversation about Ottoman and Islamic intellectual/cultural history. The very creation of such a systematically ordered inventory of books raises broad questions about knowledge production and practices of collecting, readership, librarianship, and the arts of the book at the dawn of the sixteenth century. The first volume contains twenty-eight interpretative essays on this fascinating document, authored by a team of scholars from diverse disciplines, including Islamic and Ottoman history, history of science, arts of the book and codicology, agriculture, medicine, astrology, astronomy, occultism, mathematics, philosophy, theology, law, mysticism, political thought, ethics, literature (Arabic, Persian, Turkish/Turkic), philology, and epistolary. Following the first three essays by the editors on implications of the library inventory as a whole, the other essays focus on particular fields of knowledge under which books are catalogued in MS Török F. 59, each accompanied by annotated lists of entries. The second volume presents a transliteration of the Arabic manuscript, which also features an Ottoman Turkish preface on method, together with a reduced-scale facsimile.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references. :
9789004402508 :
0921-0326 ;
Inventory of the 'lettere e scritture Turchesche' of the Venetian State Archives /
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As well as the well-known inventory written by Maria Pia Pedani Fabris in 1994, I \'Documenti Turchi\' dell'Archivio di Stato di Venezia , this book is based on the work by Alessio Bombaci from the 1940s. Pedani's work is an academic inventory of the documents in the archives Lettere e Scritture Turchesche kept in the Venetian State Archives. It describes in detail 822 documents from the first half of the 16th century until the first half of the 17th century. Part of the documents are Ottoman originals, part are Italian translations. They deal above all with commercial affairs. There are name-i hümayun s, but also letters of beylerbeyi s and sancakbeyi s of the Balkan regions and of other lower Ottoman officials.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references (p. [202]-208) and indexes. :
9789047441533 :
1877-9964 ; :
Available to subscribing member institutions only.