Ottoman Siyaq Numbers

This section contains figures that were used in Ottoman Siyaq — an Arabic script that was used in the Ottoman Empire.

It is a calligraphic style that involves the use of additional marks and diacritics to represent vowels and other phonetic features that are not present in the basic Arabic script. These additional marks were necessary to accurately represent the Turkish language, which has a different phonology than Arabic. The Ottoman Siyaq was widely used in official documents, correspondence, and literature during the Ottoman Empire, but it was gradually replaced by the Latin-based Turkish alphabet after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

Siyaq is the name of the decimal positional number system, which is common in Central and South Asia. The main feature of this system is that it has separate symbols for ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. Plus, you won't find a “zero” number.

What comes to semantics, the word siyak itself means order in the Arabic language.

The characters of the numbers are based on Arabic letters, which the names of the numbers started with. The direction of the writing goes from right to left.