The Ottoman official documents preserved at the Turkish Presidency’s State Archives, Department of Ottoman Archives, are invaluable sources on the history of the countries which were part of the Ottoman territory. To render these references accessible to historians of the Ottoman period whose main working language is Arabic, IRCICA collects selected documents relating to administration, rural development, public works, public health, education, science, scholarship, and other aspects of life in the history of Arab lands, and publishes them together with their Arabic translations, transcriptions, and explanatory annotations. The first volume of the series, containing documents from registers of the Muhimme (important matters) from the first half of the 16th century, was published in 2011. This second volume contains the images, transcriptions in Ottoman Turkish, and Arabic translations of 107 documents from the same registers and also other collections of the Department of Ottoman Archives and the Library of Topkapı Palace Museum. The documents are classified under the subject headings of “General Situation”, “Administrative Affairs”, “Waqfs and Religious Affairs”, “Emirs of Makkah al-Mukarramah and Pilgrimage”, “Legal Affairs”, “Economic Affairs”, “Tribes and Bedouin Emirates”, “Military Operations, Provision of Security and Order”, “Miscellaneous Subjects”.
