D’Alep à Paris

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

Ancient history · Art · Clan · Humanities · Mount · Sociology · Anthropology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Islamic Studies and History