DID THE OTTOMANS PRINT ARABIC-SCRIPT TEXTS BEFORE THE 18th CENTURY?

Authors : Orlin Sabev

Pages : 141-193

View : 148 | Download : 712

Publication Date : 2025-12-12

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Scholarship has established that the first instance of Arabic script printing in the Ottoman Empire occurred during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730). From 1706 to 1711, Athanasios III Dabbās printed Arabic Christian religious texts in Aleppo. From 1727 to 1742, İbrahim Müteferrika printed non-religious Ottoman Turkish texts in Istanbul. Müteferrika also created a woodblock map of the Sea of Marmara in 1132/1719–1720. However, Müteferrika and the Western author Baron Joseph von Petrasch (1714–1772) wrote that the Ottomans discussed introducing printing technology in the second half of the 17th century. This article presents and analyzes block-printed samples of poll tax (cizye) receipts in Arabic script from the 1690s, which partially support these claims. The receipts may have been printed at the initiative of the Ottoman government, which introduced a cizye collection reform in 1691, or they may have been printed illegally in an attempt to forge the original receipts. Since no state- or Muslim-owned printing press existed at that time, these samples may have been printed in the Jewish or Armenian presses that were available in Istanbul at that time.
Keywords : Block Printing, Late 17th Century, Ottoman Empire, Poll tax

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