Constantin-François Volney'in Seyahatnamesinde Suriye

Abstract

Many Western travelers visited the Ottoman Empire for various purposes in different times. Among the travelers, there were those ones such as Constantin-Francois Volney (1757-1820) or Jean Potocki (1761-1815) who set out to observe and investigate the custom and usage, life style, and belief values special for East culture, and to tell the West about these, besides those who came for business. Molded by love of Helen, F.C.H.L. Pouqueville (1770-1838), who travelled to recreate the antiquity, and Theophile Gautier (1811-872), who wrote about his experience thanks to newspaper support, were also among the travelers, who did not pursue a career in the East. The travel books written by travelers are accumulation of knowledge that not only reveals the events and archeological evidence, but mentality and points of view to the world. Travel information and evidence that shows the economic, social, religious and ethnological structures of the visited and investigated society is included in the sources that contribute to the history. Quoted as saying, “I believe travel books do not belong to novels, but the history.”, Constantin-Francois Volney (1757-1820) stated that these sources were historical data, and put the cultural diversity of the region into the service of orientalism by discovering “Syria and Egypt” in his work “Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte”. French philosopher, philologist, ethnologist, orientalist, Volney, who travelled to the East after he made the preparations for any kinds of physical conditions by going hiking in the nature, roaming in the saddle, and being hungry, was interested in the East, before America and European countries. In this article, Syria and Egypt travel book by Volney will be analyzed in terms of political and cultural aspects, along with ethnological and philological ones.