2016/11/29 by John-Paul Ghobrial · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Islamic Studies and History #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/cew417
openalex publication_date 2016/11/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
In 1707, a young man from Aleppo named Hanna Diyāb was searching for purpose in life. After a brief, unsuccessful stint as a novice in a monastery on Mount Lebanon, he decided to return home, and along the way he encountered Paul Lucas, a French traveller who had been sent to the Ottoman Empire to collect medals, coins and antiquities for Louis XIV. Lucas persuaded Hanna to work with him as a sort of factotum, and the two men visited sites scattered across the Levant, Egypt and North Africa before travelling together to France in 1708. Hanna spent over a year in Paris, only just surviving the great winter of 1709, before deciding (again) to return home in 1710. In Aleppo, he lived out the rest of his life as a successful merchant in the cloth trade, and the father and grandfather to a clan of sons, daughters and grandchildren.