Clerks and Record Keeping in State Transactions According to Kutadgu Bilig
İshak Keskin
Abstract
There are writers who make references to the procedures of registration and the archival practices and even to the subject of clerks who were involved in these procedures, all of which have been a part of the Turkish public administration from the Medieval Ages onwards. One of these writers is Yusuf Has Hâcib (1017-1077). In his work titled The Kutadgu Bilig (1070), Yusuf Has Hâcib gives information on the language, literature, social life, culture and the history of organization of the Turks, defines, on the other hand, the qualities that, the clerks to be employed in public services should have. Clerks, in this context, are among those referred to in the work in terms of their tasks and functions of registering, document producing and the running the bureaucratic procedures. In this context, the writer gives information on in addition to many other subjects - the running and the importance of the procedures of registration, document production and bureaucratic practices as recorded and on the qualities of the clerks. The main aim of the work is to analyse Yusuf Has Hâcib’s approach (in his work The Kutadgu Bilig) to the subjects of the qualities and the working styles of the clerks in the Turkish tradition, document production and the impact of the clerks on the protection of the documents produced, and even to the subject of the importance of registration-based quality of the procedures from the aspect of public administration. The work has also evaluated whether the subjects of the document practices and the qualities of the clerks as stated in the Kutadgu Bilig have been taken into consideration in the later Turkish states in terms of the continuation of the historical tradition.
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How to Cite
İshak Keskin (2013). Clerks and Record Keeping in State Transactions According to Kutadgu Bilig. IJCAS, Vol. 17, No. 1, .