Two 19t C. Ottoman Brass Qalamadans / Divit Travelling Pen Case Inkwells

Near East, Turkey, Ottoman Empire. A matched pair of brass divits, the portable pen-and-ink sets that Ottoman scribes carried tucked through a sash or belt. Each consists of a long tapering tubular case for reed pens (qalams), soldered at one end to a lobed, hinged inkpot with a domed lid. Engraved ornament runs across the inkwell facets and the case terminals: bands of hatched chevrons, fine beaded borders, and stylized foliate sprays. The surfaces have darkened to a mottled brown with green cupric accretion in the recesses. Beyond their utility, such sets carried real status in a bureaucratic empire that ran on the written word, marking their owner as literate and, often, as a functionary of the Ottoman chancery. The divit (Persian qalamdan) answered a practical problem of Islamicate scribal culture: the reed pen required a liquid, often silk-thread-thickened ink, and the scribe frequently worked away from a desk. The solution married a slim pen tube to a lidded inkpot, the two fused into a single object that could be slipped through a belt with the inkwell riding at the hip. Within the ink chamber the scribe packed raw silk floss (lika), which held the ink like a sponge and released it to the nib without spilling when the divit was inverted or jostled. In Ottoman practice the divit was also a badge of office. The scribal class of the imperial chancery, the katibs whose hands produced the firmans, registers, and diplomatic correspondence of the state, wore them visibly. Finer examples were worked in silver or damascened steel and sometimes inscribed with a pious invocation or the owner's name; brass sets such as these served the working bureaucrat, the provincial clerk, and the traveling merchant. Item # 204573

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