Abstract:

More than 100 million documents exist in Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive in Istanbul. Approximately 50 million of these documents are related to accounting. Mentioned accounting documents can be classified in four groups. First of these are, books and documents of accounting system by which the daily accounting records of government are enforced, and these are day book, conveying information document and ledgers attributed book of final entry. Accounting reports composes the second group documents. These are classified into the groups of regular reports and special reports. Reports mentioned in the first group consists of reports prepared with the aim of demonstrating the government accounting order’s monthly and annual data, such as annual definite account report in which annual income and expenditure are listed in consideration of main headings. Special reports are special-purpose reports such as lag in collection, investigation of corruption and auditing reports arranged on the notice of. In all records, both in mentioned daily accounting system, and reports, government accounting method which is called stairs method is used. It will be appropriate to denote that, while the method is using, siyaqat writings and numerals are commonly used. It is needed to demonstrate that in Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive, there are also examples of foundation accounting in which stairs method is used. The accounting documents in Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive is important for demonstrating not only Turkish accounting thought, but also Middle East accouting culture of five century, and is one of the biggest accounting history archives of the world.

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