The Expressions Eva’il, Evasit and Evahir in the Dates of Turkish Monumets (Documents)

Abstract

The subject of this paper is Gliša Elezović's treatise, Islamic Reckoning of Time and Dates in Turkish Monuments (Documents). The treatise is published as a part of Gliša Elezović's collection, Turkish Monuments, Vol. I, part l, pp. 944-980. In dating their monumets, the Islamic peoples used the Muslim calendar which reckoned time according to the Hegirian era which beg~ on July 15th or 16th, 622, in relation to the Christian era.

In dating Islamic monuments, including Turkish, a distinction can be made between complete and the incomplete dating, but this article has no intention of discussing that problem. This paper is concerned with the case when one of the three Arabic expressions mentioned in· the title is used to den ote the date of a month, i.e. when the months are divided into decades and it is noted that the document in question is written in the first, second or third decade.

This way of dating is quite frequent both in administrative documents and in manuscripts. Since nearly all orientalists, and all Islamic scholars in general, agree that the expressions eva'il, evasit and evahir denote the three decades of the month, then there is no need to discuss this problem. But, Gliša Elezović, having criticized in his treatise all those scholars who understood and interpreted the mentioned expressions as month decades, states that those expressions meant the Ist, 15th, and 29th or 30th day of a given month and that it was the only correct way of converting the Hegirian dates into the Christian calendar. This article, based on a great number of authorities and on a considerable quantity of archives and liter"iuy documents, aim to demonstrate that Gliša Elezović is wrong, and especially that he has no right to demand that his incorrect interpretation be accepted by scholars. Therefore, the expression eva'il denotes both the first decade and the first day of the month. The expression evasit denotes the second decade, as well as the fifteenth day of the month; and the expression evahir denotes the third decade, and the last day of that decade, i.e. the last day of the month. If so it happens that mentioned ·expressions coincide with the Ist, 15th or 29th or 30th day of the month it is not a p roof that those expressions denote those days exclusively. Other expressions are used to denote those days, i.e. gurre and mustehell for the flrst day, muntesaf for the 15th day, and sehl or ahir for the last day of a month. We think that we have, on the bases of numerous arguments cited, thoroughly proved Gliša Elezović wrong, and that his opinion cannot be accepted by scholars who specialize in Turkish documents, and also that one has to be cautious when using Gliša Elezović's conversion of the Hegirian dates into the Christian in his above mentioned collection.