Abstract
A chronogram in the form of poetry is the art of writing a verse, a couplet, a stanza, or a ghazal using the gematria to show the date of an important or notable event. The art in question has been used in almost all areas of life such as birth, death, appointment, dismissal from a duty, circumcision, marriage, construction of some important structures, their repairment, war, and peace. In literary works created with the Arabic alphabet, sometimes emphasis was placed on their numerical value, rather than on the sound expressed by letters or the meaning of words. One of the most important features of such poems is that it records the history of an important event in the period when they were written or confirms the history of an event recorded by historians. In this art, a word or verse that requires dexterity and mastery is expressed in a way that gives the date of an event by calculating the numerical values of the letters according to the gematria. It requires intense mental effort, as elements such as meaning, measure, and rhyme should also be paid attention to besides the gematria in the chronogrammatic poems, which are mentioned among the bedi‘ arts in the science of rhetoric. In classical Arabic literature, art products related to chronogrammatic, which can be called letter engineering and word architecture, have quite interesting examples. These artifacts, which we can often come across in private or public libraries, mosques, madrasahs, on minaret signboards, tombstones, and at the entrances of caravanserais, inns, baths, mansions, and palaces, carry the identity of a historical document along with the feature of a semantic table created by a skillful poet. Depending on the reason for writing, the poems in question were first expressed orally by ghazal citers or mourners, then engraved on paper by calligraphers, and finally engraved on marble or stones by the etchers and were handed down to the centuries to come. Scholars, writers, and poets from Siirt who produce works of compilation, translation, commentary, and annotation in every field of Islamic sciences did not remain indifferent to the heritage in question and wrote poetic works on various occasions in this field, which we can also call "numerical poetry". They gifted literary works that are valuable as historical documents to future generations by transferring many subjects such as important events affecting the society and period in which they lived, zoning and construction activities, death of prominent figures of the era. In our study, first of all, we will focus on the definition of the art of chronogrammatic, its features, its literary face, as well as its importance in terms of history, then a general framework will be drawn about the "gematria calculations", which expresses the numerical values given to the letters in the Arabic alphabet, and its features and the main points to be considered in the poems written based on the gematria. In the second part, after giving information about the main topics and usage areas of the chronogrammatic poems, the subject will be discussed in detail by giving examples from the works of scholars, writers, and poets from Siirt who were born in the age of Ottoman Empire