Bicentenaire de la Société Asiatique, 1822-2022: raretés de la bibliothèque

Abstract

Under the reassuring aspect of an erudite collection, this album is a license to hunt for treasures. Not for the borers of walls, but for the borers of mysteries. No need to force the secrets of the Pyramids or the palaces of Maharajas! Let's stay on the 'Left Bank', where the Asian Society, liberally open, continues to enrich its library, marked by the memory of Jeanne-Marie Allier, daughter of the sinologist Paul Demiéville. When it was founded on April 1, 1822, Paris was the European capital of Orientalism. Until then Asia had been the domain reserved for missionaries and merchants, whose zeal was not disinterested. 0Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), translator of the 'Avesta', was the first orientalist in the word. Since the Egyptian expedition, orientalists discovered a world even more captivating than the utopias of 'Gulliver's Travels'. Books, charts and scrolls, clay tablets, casts of lapidary inscriptions, papyri, Chinese woodcuts, latanier leaves covered with Buddhist texts flowed into the Asian Society. Later, along with the unwritten languages, came transcriptions on cement sacks, hastily jotted down by ethnologists. Present since 1822, Abel-Rémusat and Champollion faced the same challenge: to decipher ideograms using bilingual texts, Sino-Manchurian on one side, Greek-Egyptian on the other. The quest for the special characters needed to print the 'Asian Journal' was an adventure story, where Armenian merchants leaving for Egypt, ambassadors of the Tsar in Manchuria, deserving engravers, and even the generosity of the King of Prussia meet. , donor of the Devanagari letters.00Exhibition: Collège de France, Paris, France (29.11.2022-15.1.2023)