From the late nineteenth century, Ottoman and early Republican physicians and intellectuals recast masturbation through the languages of pathology, degeneration, reproduction, and demographic vitality. Drawing on medical treatises, advice literature, periodicals, psychiatric writings, and sexological publications, this article traces the changing sociopolitical meanings attached to solitary sex in Turkey between 1880 and1930. It argues that anti-masturbation discourse linked individual sexual discipline to family health, reproductive capacity, and the imagined future of the nation. Ottoman and Republican writers represented masturbation as physically depleting, morally corrosive, socially unproductive, and hostile to marriage and procreation, transforming a private sexual practice into a problem of collective vitality. Medical and moralvocabularies did not remain fixed across this period. By the early twentieth century, psychiatric writing shifted from treating masturbation primarily as a cause of illness to reading excessive masturbation as a symptom of underlying disorder. That shift did not displace older anxieties about bodily waste, sexual excess, and failed self-command; it reorganised them within new medical, demographic, and developmental frameworks. By situating these changes within debates over youth, degeneration, eugenics, and population, the article shows how solitary sex became an object of medical authority, social discipline, reproductive responsibility, and governance.
This study presents four unpublished cuneiform tablets preserved in the Iraq Museum. The texts can be dated securely to the Old Babylonian period, although their precise geographical provenance remains uncertain. The tablets document two main categories of economic activity: a silver loan designated as ḫubuttatum and barley distribution, for which there are three records. The study includes a transliteration, translation, and commentary for each text, with a focus on the socioeconomic and legal interpretation of the ḫubuttatum loan contract, as well as the measurement systems and some personal names attested in the texts.
The main subject of our study is the unpublished five fragments of Hittite cuneiform tablets, which were unearthed during the early excavations conducted between 1906 and 1912 at the central site of the Hittite empire, Boğazköy, and are currently preserved in the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. These tablets, which have not been published until today, are numbered Bo 6701+IBoT 3.62(Bo 66), Bo 6685, Bo 6683, Bo 6698, and Bo 6705. In this article, the transliterations and translations of the Bo 6701+IBoT 3.62(Bo 66), Bo 6685, Bo 6683, Bo 6698, and Bo 6705 Hittite cuneiform tablet fragments are provided; their datings, their potential joining (combining) with other Hittite cuneiform tablets, and their duplicates/parallels are evaluated. In addition, photographs of these tablet fragments are included in our study.
This article generally focuses on the Ottoman-Iranian trade that took place in the early 20th century. More specifically, it aims to examine, within the context of developments in Tabriz, one commercial diplomatic initiative that the Ottoman administration of the period attempted to implement in Iran. Indeed, the Ottoman Chamber of Commerce established in Tabriz was an important initiative by Ottoman statesmen to develop commercial and economic life. This project, implemented with the support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs personnel and the efforts of Ottoman citizens in Tabriz, achieved considerable success. Thus, one of the first chambers of commerce in Iran was established. However, bureaucratic changes, internal turmoil in Iran, and the unfavourable conditions arising from the outbreak of First World War hindered the project’s success and sustainability. Although it may appear to have been a short-term initiative, it undoubtedly injected dynamism into commercial relations between the two countries. Furthermore, this initiative can be regarded as a little-known precursor to similar initiatives that Türkiye would undertake in Iran in the future. Finally, this article, which has not been the subject of a separate study before, is primarily based on primary sources. In addition, periodicals and research studies on the subject were also used.
This article offers a case study of the Yenikapı Mevlevîhâne in Istanbul during the Hamidian era (1876–1909), when the expansion of central authority and routine intelligence gathering reshaped the conditions of urban religious life. In this setting, Mevlevî lodges were embedded in elite sociability, literary and musical culture, and informal circuits of counsel, while also attracting suspicion as spaces that could sustain autonomous influence. Recent scholarship on late Ottoman Sufism has clarified the state’s institutional reach and the changing place of Sufi lodges within projects of regulation and reform. However, individual lodges often appear in this literature as backdrops to larger political narratives. The Yenikapı Mevlevîhâne, an âsitâne (main lodge) withdense documentation and a long record of courtly connections, affords a more closely textured account of how surveillance operated on the ground and how a lodge managed its public standing under conditions of rumour and scrutiny. The article draws on Ottoman state archives, contemporary narratives, and historical records such as İhtifalci Mehmed Ziya’s Yenikapı Mevlevihânesi (1913), authored by a direct observer of the lodge’s activities during the era, the Defter-i Dervişân, a compendium of historical and biographical records maintained by the lodge’s sheikhs, and the memoirs of Mevlevî affiliates. Read together, these sources trace a shift from earlier idioms of patronage and mutual recognition to a tighter regime of administrative oversight in the late 19th century. Following the tenures of Osman Selâhaddin Dede (d. 1887) and Mehmed Celâleddin Dede (d. 1908), the article argues that Yenikapı’s political significance lay less in overt opposition than in its capacity to host conversation and cultivate reputation and connection. In doing so, it reframes Hamidian surveillance not as an external pressure applied to static institutions, but as a condition that shaped the everyday negotiation of authority, legitimacy, and sociability within a major Mevlevî lodge.
