Ottoman Geography - an Article by Franz Taeschner and an Analysis of the Transition from Eastern Scientific Tradition to European Scientific Mentalty

Abstract

This paper attempts to make a contrastive analysis of history via an article by German orientalist Taeschner (1888-1967) in which the mentality of Eastern geography, that of the Ottomans in particular, was investigated and discussed in detail. The article being analyzed in this paper was once taught as a textbook at Westfalia-Wilhelm University (1922) in Munster, Germany. Only four years later, it was published under the name of Ottoman Geography on pages 271 through 314 in the second volume of Journal of Turkology after it had been translated by Hamid Sami. All books with a great impact on medieval Ottoman geographers are compared with a critical approach in the article by Taeschner, where not only the copies of the books in Europe but also those of the books in Ottoman libraries are introduced to the reader. Furthermore, it attempts to explain the change observed in the orientalist science and geography mentality based upon the similarities and differences between these books. Finally, Taeschner goes on to talk in this article about how the mentality of European science in the 18th and 19th centuries affected Ottoman science mentality and discusses the books through which this effect was achieved.