Beschreibung:

Ibn Shaddad, History of Aleppo (Izz' al-Din Ibn Shaddad, Al-A'lak al-Khafira fi Dikr Umara al-Sham wa al-Jazeera), in Arabic, produced for patron in France, decorated manuscript on paper [probably Aleppo or perhaps Constantinople, dated Rabi al-thani 1079 AH (September 1688 AD)] 196 leaves, plus 4 endpapers, complete, single column, 13 lines in black naskh, headings and important phrases in red, exceptionally clean copy, nineteenth-century ink inscriptions to endpapers in English, 215 by 155 mm.; contemporary morocco over pasteboards, stamped and ruled in blind with decorative medallions to centre of covers, but without flap, ruled in blind, early inscription No 4 in black ink to upper cover, edges worn with loss to leather, revealing Arabic manuscript leaves compacted to reuse as pasteboards An exceptionally rare example of a text in Arabic, produced for a European (here probably from Lyon, France) on western paper; still in its contemporary Western-style Arabic binding Provenance: 1. Produced in the Near East in 1688 for a French patron, and then sent back to Europe: the text was copied and the codex bound in the Near East, but the Arabic penmanship is in an obviously simple style (probably to accommodate a reader who might not be fluent in the nuances of contemporary Arabic calligraphy), and the binding was produced without a flap, like Western and Greek bindings. Most crucially, the double watermark of a bunch of grapes and a fleur-de-lys set above a banderole with initials (here D. D) place this in a tight knit group of grape watermarks which centre on France (more specifically Paris, Lyon and regions of coastal southern France) in the second half of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, and is extremely close to Briquet 13206 (Lyons, 1630). Moreover, this copy is dedicated in its colophon to a king Lawus al-ma'rouf bubin (Louis the great/famous de Bourbon, ie. King Louis XIV the Sun King, who reigned from 1654 to 1715), who is al-Roumi' among the Romans (most probably meaning non-Arabs and non-Greeks). There were Arabists in France from the 1530s onwards, and both Lyon and Paris were active in the teaching and printing of Arabic from the second half of the sixteenth century. The present volume was most probably commissioned for a member of the academic community in Lyon. Surviving examples of such commissions are exceedingly rare, and only one other is known to us: an Arabic translation of the works of Apollonius of Perga (lost in the original Greek), copied in the same simple script in Aleppo for the seventeenth-century Leiden scholar Jacobus Golius (Arabic Studies in the Netherlands, 2014, p. 42, with pl. on 44). 2. By the nineteenth century the book was in England, receiving its English titles on both its first and last endleaves, as well as an apparent price in £s, shillings and pence on its back pastedown. 3. Bengt Schönbäck of Sweden: his bookplate on back pastedown, and with brief pencil descriptions in that language on endleaf. Text: Ibn Shaddad (1217-1285) served the Ayyubid dynasty as an official in Aleppo, and is best known for this text, which contains a historical geography of Syria and Upper Mesopotamia. It was written while in exile in Egypt after the Mongol invasion of Syria in 1260. This volume names its contents as the Tarikh Ibn Shaddad fi Haleb, an alternative short title to that given above. Binding: The binding here is distinctively Near Eastern, and the boards are composed from seventeenth-century Arabic manuscript leaves. However, a 20mm. long section of the original leather of the outermost edge of the back board shows that this binding cannot have ever had a flap. This probably represents an attempt by an Arabic bookbinder to bind in the style of Western books, as part of this highly individual commission for a Western Arabist.