Illustrated synopsis of the geological structure of Qatar prepared by Qatar Petroleum for the Department of Petroleum Affairs. Includes geological maps, cross sections, and detailed lithostratigraphic tables. An extract from the Abu Dhabi Well Evaluation Conference book of November 1981.
In excellent condition.
Company news bulletins for English and Arabic speaking audiences. Advertising deep drilling rigs and celebrating Demag installations operating in oil fields all over the world for more than 25 years. Reprinted from Demag News no. 158.
Edges of the Arabic pamphlet slightly worn, otherwise very well preserved.
Two issues of the Muslim World League monthly periodical in Arabic. The 1975 issue prominently discusses the Mosque Message Conference held in Mecca, featuring a statement of HM Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1913-82) and the speech of HRH Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz (born 1942), along with rare images and resolutions of the conference, the purpose of which was to reorganise the mosques and restore the Qur'anic spirit to their sacred message.
The 1976 issue includes a demand from the Islamic World to expel Israel from the United Nations, as well as resolutions and recommendations of the First African Islamic Conference.
Very well preserved.
First edition: the first volume of Santarem's important and early study of the Cortes Gerais (General Courts) of Portugal. The cortes formed the royal Parliament of Portugal, consisting of the representatives of three estates. Santarem describes the history of the Portuguese Cortes through documents drawn from the Portuguese Royal Archives (Torro do Tombo), covering election processes, sessions, consultancies, etc.
The second Visconde de Santarem (1791-1856), who specialized in paleography and diplomatics, is known as one of the most important historiographers of 19th century Portugal. He has been called "the greatest figure in the history of Portuguese cartography" (Cortesão, History of Portuguese Cartography I, 23); in fact, it was Santarem who coined the term "cartographia". He served as state archivist, diplomat, and minister of the overseas territories in Portugal until 1833. In 1807, he went to Brazil with the royal family, where he became interested in historical studies and began to collect and study documents and manuscripts regarding the relations between Portugal and foreign countries. When he had to relocate to Paris for political reasons in 1833, he continued his studies on Portuguese history, especially on the role of the country in the Age of Discovery. Although he spent the remainder of his life in Paris, his standing with the Portuguese government later improved to the point that the government funded many of his publications, and appointed him Keeper of the Torre do Tombo without requiring him to return.
The first English language edition of Chao's important book on trade between China and various countries in the Arabian Peninsula, South East Asia, and Africa in the 13th century.
"Zhu Fan Zhi", commonly translated as "A Description of Barbarian Peoples" or "Records of Foreign Nations", is a two-volume book that Chao Ju-Kua wrote when he was supervisor of maritime trade in Quanzhou, Fujian, based on his interviews with foreign merchants and information from early Chinese texts. The first volume describes the various countries and their customs, the second volume describes their produce. He describes nearly sixty places including Mecca, Oman, Mosul, Baghdad, Alexandria, India, the Byzantine Empire, Taiwan, and Korea. As he never travelled outside China and his information was based on hearsay from merchants, some of the places he described are imaginary, apparently based on the Arabic myths, such as the "Countries of Women". The second volume describes various products that are local to these countries, such as frankincense, myrrh, dragon's blood, parrots, pearls, rose water, aloe, etc. The folding map is titled "Map to illustrate the 'Description of Barbarous Peoples' (Chu-Fan Chi) by Chau Ju-Kua", marking the mentioned countries and cities.
First edition of this travelogue, reflecting on the East Coast of Africa and journeys into the Arabian Peninsula, most notably Mecca and Aden. Eight chapters are dedicated to Zanzibar, six to Muscat, six to Aden, and eleven full chapters for Mecca, including discussions of everything from the ivory trade, male and female modes of dress, camels, the British bombardment and conquest of Aden, Bedouins, coffee, marriages, funerals, etiquette at homes and tables, and even business hours, naming traditions, and smoking. Described firsthand are the corporal punishments personally carried out by the young governor of Mecca, the use of rhinoceros hide on Bedouin shields, the preparation of coffee, the attitudes of children, and even the design of homes. Osgood, an American, was partial to Arab society in particular, and evidently enjoyed his time in it.
Rare views of Morocco prepared by a French student of photography. The charming photographs include the Sultan touring the land and a parade in his honour, along with views of Fez, Marrakech, Meknès and Mazagam. Among additional subjects are the Volubilis ruins before their restoration started in 1930, the Portuguese Cistern at Mazagam, the Safi gardens, the Mogador dunes, mosques, souqs, oriental patios and interiors, fountains, olive groves, dancing berbers, and caravanseries.
Compiled to resemble a photo album reflecting what appears to have been a study trip to practice plein-air photography and heliogravure. With a teacher's commentary regarding the images' quality ("too much covered by shadows" or "shape inferior to the others", transl.), suggesting that the booklet was submitted as a class assignment, making it all the more unique.
Covers somewhat worn and waterstained with slight duststaining, images crisp and clean.
One of the earliest extant documents in world history to be written in ink: a wooden tablet in New Roman cursive, the first true cursive script with minuscules. Succeeding the earlier, unsophisticated Old Roman cursive in the 3rd century, the style was quickly adopted as the daily script of the later Roman Empire and used widely beyond the official chanceries: not simply a stylistic variation, it is a foundational element in the development of written language in Western Europe and the ultimate precursor of all subsequent medieval minuscules, including our own lower-case alphabet.
Roman writing tablets were a crucial medium of communication in antiquity. Typically made from oblong pieces of wood pieces, they usually had a wax surface that was inscribed with a stylus. While the vast majority of ancient writing tablets is lost, examples of such wax slates ("tabulae ceratae") were discovered in Pompeii, and between 2010 and 2013 a significant collection was unearthed in London's financial district, dating from 50 to 80 CE.
Inked tablets, by contrast, are vastly more uncommon than wax examples. A trove of these remarkable slates was discovered in the fort of Vindolanda, south of Hadrian's Wall; each tablet is approximately the size of a modern postcard, and similarly thin. These specimens, now in the British Museum, are considered the earliest known surviving instances of ink-written letters from the Roman era.
The ink tablet at hand, however, represents a third group, the rarest of them all. The closest example are the "Tabulae Albertini", cedar wooden tablets which are larger and thicker than those from Vindolanda. Written in Northern Africa in the late 5th century CE, they were discovered in the region of Tébessa, Algeria, in 1928. The present tablet, however, is at least a century older, and although it has been reused, the recessed area never held any wax. No traces from earlier writing with a stylus is evident, so the previous text was probably washed off - a common practice with the ink tablets.
In his Historia Naturalis (book 35, §25), Pliny gives a classic account of "atramentum" ("ink", or literally, "blacking"), describing it as a mineral "made from soot in various forms, as (for instance) of burnt rosin or pitch ... The ink of the very best quality is made from the smoke of torches. An inferior article is made from the soot of furnaces and bath-house chimneys. Some manufacturers employ the dried lees of wine ... Polygnotus and Micon, celebrated painters at Athens, made their black paint from burnt grape-vines ... The dyers make theirs from the dark crust that gradually accumulates on brass-kettles. Ink is made also from torches (pine-knots), and from charcoal pounded fine in mortars ... Book-writers' ink has gum mixed with it, weaver's ink is made up with glue. Ink whose materials have been liquified by the agency of an acid is erased with great difficulty".
The text, written in formulaic legal language, forms the end of what is probably a sales contract between the buyer (emptor) Bassus and a person called Neronianus. The full document would have been a diptych or triptych, comprising two or even three tablets.
An oath renouncing the practice of the Chinese rites, taken by the prominent Portuguese Jesuit as required by the Papal Bull "Ex Quo Singulari" (1742). The oath was sworn on the Bible, and a form signed in one's own hand ("manu propria") had to be produced as evidence. Depending on the availability, most of these documents are co-signed by church officials, senior friars, or equals as witnesses to an oath sworn in their presence ("in manibus meis"), in this case the Macau-born Chinese Jesuit Manuel de Moraes (1711-54).
António José Henriques is best known today as the first Jesuit martyr in China along with Tristano Francesco d'Attimis. In his previous vocation as a diplomat, Henriques accompanied the Portuguese ambassador Alexandre Metelo de Sousa e Meneses on his 1726/27 mission to China that was received by the Yongzheng Emperor in Beijing. Henriques chose to stay in China as a missionary and entered the Jesuit novitiate in Macau in 1727. After studies at the Jesuit college in Manila, Henriques returned to Macau in 1736 and was subsequently sent to join the mission in Nanjing. In 1744 the bishop of Beijing, Polycarpo da Sousa, entrusted Henriques with the succession of Roman Hinderer as Vicar General for the Jiangnan province (today's Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhenjiang provinces), where he worked alongside Moraes and D'Attimis. In 1747, new orders from Beijing reached the province, starting an even more severe wave of persecution. The hiding places of Henriques and D'Attimis were eventually revealed by converts under duress, and they were arrested in December 1747. Imprisoned in Sozhou, they first received a mild sentence but the trial was repeated on orders of the governor of Nanjing, who was hoping for personal gain from severe punishment of the missionaries. In a long and brutal trial, both men were condemned to death and, after the Emperor's confirmation, executed by strangulation on 12 September 1728.
During the early years of their mission to East Asia, the Jesuits led by Matteo Ricci accommodated Catholicism to Chinese customs and Confucian practice in important ways, both for political reasons and in the hope of attracting more converts. Criticism of this syncretism is as old as the Chinese rites themselves, and Ricci's immediate successor Niccolò Longobardo attempted to change course, which led to his replacement as provincial. When Dominican and Franciscan missionaries entered China, they reported to Rome critically on the Jesuit practices. A first condemnation was decreed by Pope Clement XI in 1704 and confirmed in the 1715 Bull "Ex Illa Die". In reaction to the condemnation, the Kiangxi Emperor, who initially tolerated the Christian missionaries and had especially good relations with the Jesuits, officially forbade Christian missions in China. In 1721, Carlo Ambrosio Mezzabarba, the Latin Patriarch of Alexandria, was sent to Macau and Beijing as a Papal legate. Despite the concession of "eight permissions" regarding the practice of the Chinese rites, officiated in a pastoral letter to the missionaries from 4 November 1721, the Emperor did not revoke the ban. Finally, in "Ex Quo Singulari", Pope Benedict XIV re-affirmed the 1715 Bull and required all missionaries in the region to take the oath renouncing the practice of Chinese rites.
A transcription and translation of the document are available on request.
First edition: one of only 375 copies of this lovely book of poems. Complete with the portrait of Paul Verlaine by Louis Hayet. In excellent condition.
Scientific paper outlining the phenomenal growth of Middle Eastern oil reserves since 1944 with particular attention to all 90 oil fields in the Iraq-Iran-Arabia Basin. The large folding plate illustrates the distribution of these fields among the states of the Middle East, listing all 90 oil fields by name and geological age.
Offprint from the Journal of the Institute of Petroleum. Small tears to wrappers. Interior very well preserved.
Scientific paper addressing the problems of isopach and facies maps regarding specific uncertainties that affect oil search in the Iraq-Iran-Arabian Gulf basin. The meticulous plates include facies maps and diagrams, illustrating stratigraphic issues like variations in thickness between control sections, and irregularities from erosion.
Ownership stamps of the UCNS Department of Geology. A few faint creases to wrappers, otherwise very well preserved.
Rare albumen photograph, produced by the first ever Arab photographer of the city of Mecca. Abd al-Ghaffar was the first resident of Mecca to photograph the holy sites among which he lived and worked, producing some of the earliest photographs of the Kaaba and the sights of the Hajj. He ranks alongside the likes of Ottoman-Egyptian engineer and photographer Mohammad Sadiq Bey (1822/32-1902) and the Dutch photographer Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857-1936), with whom he worked closely, as a pioneer photographer of not only Mecca, but of the holy sites of Islam throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
Only edition: a rare attempt to glean stories and sayings of Christ and early Christian church leaders from Arabic sources, in particular from the Qur'an - a subject matter which required the use of interspersed quotations, translations, and commentaries in Arabic and Latin. Warner was a student of Golius and L'Empereur; he was offered to succeed the latter as Professor of Hebrew, but chose to remain in Istanbul, where he was appointed Resident of the States General of the Netherlands. His large collection of manuscripts forms the cornerstone of the Oriental collections of Leiden's University Library.
"The main work (38 pp.) consists of quotations mainly in Arabic, with translation and commentary; an appendix sets forth various religious tenets in Arabic, Persian or Turkish with translations. Warner's sources are given as the 'Kitab al-Kassaf' and the 'Gulistan'" (Smitskamp). "Aux pp. 39-56 est un Appendix miscellaneorum theologicorum" (Chauvin).
A fine example of early Arabic typesetting from the Dutch Golden Age. The printer, Joannes Maire (d. ca. 1657), cooperated closely with Leiden University and is remembered as the publisher of Descartes and a personal friend of the Dutch orientalist Thomas van Erpe (1584-1624).
A souvenir album of colonial French Algeria and Tunisia ca. 1890, intended for a European audience. Such albums of albumen photographs were increasingly popular in the Levant at the close of the 19th century, and similar demand was sparked for views of newly conquered and colonized French North Africa.
Centered on the urban scenes of Algiers and Tunis, though with several rural scenes, views of the markets, mosques, and streets of smaller Biskra, and an Arab café in Sidi Bou Said, the albums show carefully tailored but nonetheless revealing snapshots of urban life in these two cities. In Algiers, one might see the People's Palace prior to 1910s renovations, including an elaborate interior, the Jardin d'Essai (Test Garden of Hamma), and a panoramic view of the city of Algiers in full. These are filled out with mosques, cathedrals, and especially street views, where French hotels line squares alongside mosques.
In the Tunis photographs, one may see the Dar Hussain Palace ("Palace of General Sidi-Houssin"), Bab Jazira Mosque, and the Avenue to de France decorated for Bastille Day - a reminder of the French invasion less than ten years before.
First edition, 11th printing of Puzo's genre-defining masterpiece and basis for Frank Coppola's iconic 1972 film by the same name, inscribed by the author "Best, Mario Puzo" on the title-page.
Mario Puzo (1920-99) grew out of a childhood in Hell's Kitchen into one of the great novelists and screenwriters of the 20th century. The Godfather is his best-known work, and for his collaboration with Coppola he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; he and Coppola would go on to collaborate on further films, including The Cotton Club (1984).
