Léon Cahun

In 1863 he began to publish a series of geographical articles and accounts of his travels in Egypt and neighboring countries in the Revue Française.

Meanwhile, Cahun had begun to publish a series of historical novels dealing with ancient history, in the style of the journeys of Anacharsis in Greece.

These novels include: Les Aventures du Capitaine Magon, on Phoenician explorations one thousand years before the common era (Paris, Hachette, 1875); La Bannière Bleue, the adventures of a Muslim, a Christian, and a pagan at the time of the Crusades and the Mongolian conquest (ib.

His scholarly study of local customs, Scènes de la Vie Juive en Alsace, with preface by Zadoc Kahn, chief rabbi of Paris, appeared about the same time (ib.

Cahun's Introduction Générale à l'Histoire de l'Asie (1896), based on material gathered during his travels, is a complete and exact history of that continent.

Some years before his death Cahun ceased writing for the Parisian periodicals, but to the end he contributed to Le Phare de la Loire.

Cahun's novel La Bannière bleue (1877) acted as a major source of inspiration for Turkish nationalist current in the Ottoman Empire and his history work Introduction à l'histoire de l'Asie: Turcs et Mongols des origines à 1405 (1896) had great impact on the nationalistic historiography of the Republican era.

[2] Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic had also been an avid reader of Cahun's Introduction à l'histoire de l'Asie[3] which included influence of a Turkish race in the early development of the European civilization.