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The archival practices of the Ottoman State can be learnt by analysing the devices that inspired the administrative practices of this state. And this requires knowing the Turkish-Islamic-Persian State tradition. By doing so, on the one hand the way that bureaucratic and archival processes pass from one state to another can be observed and, on the other hand, an answer to the problem of originality of the Otoman archival practices can be found.

In the Ottoman State bureaucracy, various document destruction practices are seen. During the military reform period of Mahmud II, documents related to the Janissaries and the intelligence journals of Abdülhamid II that were preserved in Çırağan Palace were destroyed by the authorities of the period. Apart from these two practices, there were some other individual cases of document destruction too in the Ottoman period. The reasons why Ottoman bureaucrats practiced these acts of document destruction and whether the reasons were related to a theoretical basis or not are open to further research. The aim of this article is to consider some examples and draw significant conclusions regarding the main approaches on the issue of document destruction during the Ottoman period. Another aim is to examine whether those practices -regardless of whether they were carried out on a legal and administrative basis- had a common character, whether those document destruction practices presented a theoretical approach, or whether they had a scientific quality or not. The study used the qualitative research method and case studies, and it used document analysis technique for data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archival practices of the Ottoman State can be learnt by analysing the devices that inspired the administrative practices of this state. And this requires knowing the Turkish-Islamic-Persian State tradition. By doing so, on the one hand the way that bureaucratic and archival processes pass from one state to another can be observed and, on the other hand, an answer to the problem of originality of the Otoman archival practices can be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]