🎲 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.
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.