there are the fifteen icy days in December 1708, the coldest winter in five hundred years, during which tens of thousands froze to death. “Paris was a ghost town . . . The priests of the city were forced to set up braziers on the altars of their churches to prevent the sacramental wine from freezing. Many people even died while relieving themselves, because the urine froze in their urethras as it left their bodies and killed them.” Diyāb has to be rubbed from head to toe with eagle fat (another of Lucas’s remedies) and wrapped in blankets for twenty-four hours before he recovers sensation in his limbs. It is in these moments of plain, precise language that hunger, thirst, and cold—untranslatable pain—come through.
Unusually for a travel writer, Diyāb is a working man. For all the pomp of the French court, his attention remains trained on those who, like him, labor invisibly: hospital workers who serve soup three times a day in tin bowls; nuns who launder clothes in the river; prostitutes whose doors are marked by a large heart made of thorns. Striking, too, is the sheer violence of everyday life. In Livorno he sees a soldier punished for desertion—nostrils slashed and forehead branded with the king’s seal. In Paris he goes to a courthouse to watch the trial of highway robbers, and to the public square to see them killed.
A thought recurred as I read: you couldn’t make it up. While Lucas bathes rusty coins in vinegar to reveal their inscriptions, Diyāb probes the strangeness of the world. Miracles—magical causes applied to mechanical effects—jostle with the most daily phenomena. The true colors of things take on a hallucinated quality. If the Dauphin’s bestiary contains no jerboa, can his own eyes be trusted? If the remedy is bogus, but you were healed, what then?
Scholars argue over how much of Diyāb is in Aladdin, where to draw the line between fiction and truth. This memoir smudges such distinctions by showing how fantasy is woven into life, how enchantment is neighbor to inquiry. At the opera, Diyāb is dazzled by stage contraptions. Knowing how they are built does nothing to lessen their magic. Mechanical causes with magical effects: this is art.
Yasmine Seale
Istanbul
Acknowledgments
Editor’s acknowledgments
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to those colleagues who helped me during the process of preparing this edition and added to my understanding of the text and its context. Altogether, this work is the outcome of a physical and mental voyage over almost a decade. I wish to first of all thank Reinhard Schulze in Bern (Switzerland), who directed me to the scarcely studied group of texts written by Maronite travelers from Aleppo during the mid-eighteenth century. Leafing through Georg Graf’s famous reference work, itself a time machine through early modern and modern Ottoman history, I noticed Ḥannā Diyāb’s text, attributed to “Anonymous.” That sparked my curiosity. In the years to follow and with the support of the University of Bern I was able to travel to Lebanon and to the Vatican to see The Book of Travels, as well as to Germany, to the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha to consult manuscripts from Ḥannā Diyāb’s time. I wish to thank the Orient-Institut Beirut for their support during my stay as a researcher there in 2013. I was able to gain insight into numerous collections of manuscripts from the early modern period in Lebanon. My stay in Lebanon brought me in touch with the Bibliothèque Orientale at the Université de Saint-Joseph in Beirut, where employees Magda Nammour and Karam El Hoyek in particular helped with the consultation of manuscripts relevant to this project.
Over the years of working on my PhD thesis on Ḥannā Diyāb and this edition I enjoyed informative conversations with Ibrahim Akel, Bernard Heyberger, Paule Fahmé-Thiéry, and Hilary Kilpatrick, among others, during my trips to Denmark, France, and Switzerland. All of them shared important perspectives on the material at hand. For help with the preparation of the edition I wish to thank Ziad Bou Akl and Enass Khansa as well as my students in Bern for sharing their impressions on the tone, style, and linguistic register of the text. Thanks also to Elias Muhanna and Michael Cooperson for the fruitful exchange and for the efficient collaborative process; the same goes for the whole Library of Arabic Literature crew for their support of this project. I also wish to express my gratitude to everyone at the Kalīla and Dimna – AnonymClassic project, where I currently hold a research post, notably Beatrice Gründler and Isabel Toral who are interested in the continuation of my research on the Middle Arabic register. Special thanks, lastly, go to my partner Feriel who during our holidays followed my geeky attempt to find the “Tower of Skulls,” without any doubt one of today’s most thrilling sights in Houmt Souk (Djerba, Tunisia).
Translator’s acknowledgments
For Laila and Maya
I wish to express my gratitude to the many individuals whose contributions have enriched this book. Johannes Stephan has been all that one could ask for in a co-author, and Michael Cooperson’s erudition and wit have improved our work immeasurably. I’m grateful to Paolo Horta for helping to interest the Library of Arabic Literature in the manuscript, to Philip Kennedy and the rest of the Editorial Board for their faith in the project, and to an anonymous reviewer for many helpful suggestions. Chip Rossetti, Lucie Taylor, and the production team have taken scrupulous care of our work. I would like to thank Professors Hilary Kilpatrick and Jérôme Lentin for introducing me to Diyāb’s manuscript many years ago. Finally, I thank my wife Jen, whose discernment has caught many an unmusical phrase, and my daughters Laila Rose and Maya, whose love has kept me whole when, as Diyāb would say, the world seemed to crowd in upon my miserable self.
Introduction
Johannes Stephan
The author of The Book of Travels (Kitāb al-Siyāḥah),1 Ḥannā Diyāb,2 became known to Western scholarship more than a century after his death, when his name was discovered in the diaries of Antoine Galland, the great French Orientalist and translator of the Thousand and One Nights.3 Since that discovery, Diyāb, a Maronite Christian merchant and storyteller from Aleppo, has become a familiar figure to scholars interested in the textual history of the Nights. He has been described as Galland’s muse: The informant who supplied several famous stories to the French translation of the collection, including “Aladdin” and “ʿAlī Bābā and the Forty Thieves.”
Until the early 1990s, few scholars were aware that in 1764 Diyāb had written his own travelogue.4 Because the first pages were missing, his work was catalogued as anonymous by the Catholic priest Paul Sbath, who came into possession of it at some point in the early twentieth century.5 After Sbath’s death in 1945, his family gave the manuscript to the Vatican Library, where it remains today. The work is an account of Diyāb’s travels, mostly in the company of a Frenchman named Paul Lucas. Starting in early 1707, from the vicinity of Diyāb’s hometown of Aleppo, the two journeyed through Ottoman Syria, then traveled across the Mediterranean to Paris, passing through Cyprus, Alexandria, Cairo, Fayoum, Tripoli, Djerba, Tunis, Livorno, Genoa, Marseille, Lyon, and the court of Versailles, among many other places. They arrived in Paris in September 1708 and lived there together for several months. In June 1709, Diyāb set out for home. His voyage took him first to Istanbul, where he lived for some time. After crossing Anatolia by caravan, he returned home to Aleppo in June 1710.
Ḥannā Diyāb’s connection to the Thousand and One Nights has long tantalized scholars,
