🎲 Games · Game 2
Inscription Master
The doors of Amasya's monuments carry real inscriptions, and the dates on them are Hijri. In this game you will convert those dates to the Gregorian calendar (AD). First, learn how it is done.
First, the rule: from Hijri to AD
The Hijri calendar follows the Moon; the Gregorian calendar follows the Sun. A Hijri year is about 11 days shorter than a Gregorian year. So, over time, the Hijri years catch up with the Gregorian ones. That is why converting is not a simple addition.
622 is the AD year of the Hijra — the start of the calendar. ÷ 33 makes up for the 11-day difference above: every 33 Hijri years gain one year. The ≈ sign matters: the result is approximate, because a Hijri year spreads over two Gregorian years.
Example — the Darüşşifa (Bimarhane): the Arabic inscription on the
portal says AH 708.
708 + 622 = 1330 · 708 ÷ 33 ≈ 21 ·
1330 − 21 = 1309.
The year the sources give: 1308–1309. Being a year out is normal,
because we do not know the month.
Question 1
Best: —The inscription says
AH —
—
The inscriptions in the questions are real. All of them stand on monuments in Amasya, and their Hijri–AD equivalents were taken from the stop pages on this site. After answering a question you can go to that monument's page and read the full translation of the inscription.
The guest of the celebration
The double-headed eagle: the bird in the stone
On the stone reliefs of Seljuk buildings the double-headed eagle appears alongside birds, bulls and dragons. According to Vedat Söyleyici, the double-headed eagle, which holds an important place in Anatolian Seljuk metalwork, was seen as the symbol of the state. Get five out of five and the eagle in the stone will come to life for you.
- In stoneSeljuk buildings carry reliefs of birds, bulls, dragons and double-headed eagles.
- Among the early TurksThe eagle was believed to stand for strength and might.
- In AmasyaDoor knockers studied around Amasya bear animal figures such as lions and eagles.
The collection of Amasya legends we have contains no story about the double-headed eagle; here it comes to life only for the celebration. The eagle is an illustration made with AI (Google Gemini); the wind in the celebration is decoration, not a belief. Sources: Vedat Söyleyici, Geçmişten Günümüze Amasya (Amasya: Amasya Belediyesi, n.d.), 120-121; İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Selçuklu Tarihi (İstanbul: Millî Eğitim Basımevi, 1972), 133; quotations are our translations.
And what about ebced?
On some inscriptions the date is not written in figures. Instead, every letter has a numerical value, and the poet composes a line whose letters add up to the year. This is called “dropping the date” (tarih düşürmek, a chronogram), and among the Ottomans it was counted a fine skill.
The numerical values of the letters
The order comes from the eight words that give the system its name: ebced · hevvez · huttî · kelemen · sa'fes · karaşet · sehaz · dazağ
The letter names are given as they are said in Ottoman Turkish.
And here is the price of it
When a date is written in letters, its reading can be disputed. Amasya has a perfect example: the rebuilding inscription of the Gümüşlü Mosque is written in ebced and has been read in three different ways — some researchers say AH 890, others AH 895; one source even read the year as 1491 and recorded the builder as a different person altogether.