Tournefort’s Voyage as Scientific Inquiry into the Levant

Abstract

The genre of travel has been an essential source of knowledge for the general public and governments throughout many centuries. At times, it accompanied exploration, colonization, functioned as a political statement, ethnographical account, scientific report, religious indoctrination, as well as journalistic report and entertainment. Travel literature, as a result of travels to the Orient, brought together all of these functions and contributed to the construction and perpetuation of the discourse of Orientalism, denoting a particular way of writing about and representing the Orient; people, lands, architecture, flora, and fauna. Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) was a professor of botany at the Jardin des Plantes, a botanical garden in Paris. At the beginning of the 18th century, accompanied by a physician and an artist, Tournefort set out on a journey from Marseilles to Crete and travelled around the Levant for two years. The journey was financed by the French crown, and one of his charges was to write letters of the report to the Royal Chancellor Louis Phélypeaux Comte de Pontchartrain. These letters were collected and published as A Voyage into the Levant in two volumes. In addition to collecting and describing the plant specimens he encountered, which were formerly unseen in Europe, he provided the Chancellor and later the general public with a very detailed ethnographic and geographic account. In this study, Tournefort’s travel narrative is analyzed to reveal the consistencies with and digressions from the discourse of Orientalism with a special focus on Tournefort’s interest in architecture.