BATMAN MEHMET CABİR ALPER ARKEOLOJİ MÜZESİ’NDEKİ OSMANLI DÖNEMİ MEZAR TAŞLARI
SOME OTTOMAN TOMBSTONES IN THE BATMAN MEHMET CABIR ALPER ARCHAEOLOGY MUSEUM

Summary/Abstract: Batman is rapidly developing to become one of the important cities of the Southeastern Anatolia Region. Batman’s organic connection with the surrounding important medieval cities of Diyarbakır, Mardin, Meyyafarikin, Hasankeyf, Bitlis and Siirt and its location connecting these cities have always served to make it a stopover point. Various cultural assets, the majority of which are artifacts brought from the excavation sites in the Ilısu Dam Basin, are exhibited in the museum established in Batman, a rapidly developing city today. Among these artifacts, gravestones brought from a tomb in Ufaca Village of Siirt’s Eruh District and from Batman’s Hasankeyf District were examined within the scope of the research. 11 gravestones were evaluated within the discipline of Art History in terms of form, decoration and content. It was observed that the gravestones covering a period from the 16th century to the 20th century had some unique characters as well as features that largely repeated the gravestone culture in Anatolian geography. The Arabic prayer expressions used on the Hasankeyf tombstones, although similar uses are found in many parts of Anatolia, reveal a regional use. The order and content of the inscriptions and the changes in the fonts over time are discussed through the examples in the subject. Again, the form and heading features in the Eruh examples are evaluated within the Anatolian tombstone culture. The motifs on the tombstones consist of military items such as daggers and shields that repeat regional styles, ethnographic items such as candlesticks and harmal, and plant ornamental compositions created with rumi and palmettes, especially in the Hasankeyf examples. Although the inscriptions on the tombstones are in Thuluth script, it has been observed that there is a clear quality difference between the centuries. The very regular, intricate and stacked Thuluth font in the 16th century examples of Hasankeyf gave way to Thuluth script in the form of lines with coarser lines in the 19th century. Re-functioning the gravestones located in the Museum Park area in the museum's warehouse and garden, using the data obtained during the study, and especially restoring the broken stones and preparing them for display, is very important in order to convey the gravestone culture around Batman.

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