Primary Study on Reconstruction of Original Order of the Ottoman Archives

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The Ottoman Empire, which lasted from the 14th to the 20th century with its extended domain in Europe, Asia, and Africa, has left a large number of archives. The Prime Minister's Ottoman Archives of the Republic of Turkey preserves more than 150 million materials in Istanbul They are precious first-rate sources for historical study, not only of the Middle East and Eastern Europe but also of the rest of the world.However, the materials of the period before the 1840s preserved in several depots in Istanbul, moved from place to place, mixed with each other, and even sold as waste paper or destroyed. Accordingly, their original orders were lost, and it has become quite difficult to reconstruct them. After 1930s, materials are classified depending on the principle of provenance into the fonds named by the departments of the Ottoman bureaucracy. Nevertheless, it must be noticed that some documents have been classified into the fonds of the departments that were not their original provenance because the recognition of departments as provenance was made by mere presumption.In the Ottoman bureaucracy, the types of documents are generally mentioned in the text of other documents drawn in the same transactions reciprocally, and the texts of the documents are quoted and repeated. So it is not impossible to reconstruct the forms and the texts of some documents undiscovered or destroyed. The Ottoman archives in Baghdad, which recently suffered from a devastating blow during the Iraq War and were seriously damaged, can be reconstructed to some degree through analysis of the archival materials in Istanbul.