Ottoman Paleography II

The second half of the Ottoman paleography sequence pushes you past the basics into genuinely difficult material: chancery documents and chronicle passages from the post-classical period through the nineteenth century, where script conventions, vocabulary, and diplomatic forms shift considerably across eras. Most weeks revolve around sitting with a document, transcribing it, and arguing for a reading in both written and oral form, so the work is closer to a graduate seminar in archival practice than a language class. For anyone planning to do primary-source research in Ottoman history, this is the course that turns the archive from a wall of unreadable nesih and rik'a into something you can actually work with.