NIEBUHR, Carsten, and others (Johan Louis GERLAGH, compiler and draftsman).
Aanteekeningen uit de Reise naar Arabie, en andere omliggende landen, van Carsten Niebuhr, geteekent en geschreeven door Joh. Louis Gerlagh.
[Hoeven? (near Breda)], 1785. Folio (29 x 22 cm). Manuscript in Dutch, written in ink on paper, with two loosely inserted supplements (2 bifolia), with a calligraphic title-page and 39 pages of (mostly) ink and grey ink wash drawings, plus a small drawing of an inscription and a few written examples in the text. Contemporary half canvas, sides covered with printed pattern paper. 63, [10] ll.
€ 75,000
A Dutch illustrated manuscript devoted to the Arabian peninsula and neighbouring regions, compiled in 1785 by (and the illustrations drawn by) Johan Louis Gerlagh (1735-1798), a director of the Dutch West India Company and East India Company (WIC and VOC). He takes a special interest in the various and styles of script, including Egyptian hieroglyphs and at least six styles of Arabic script, but he also discusses and illustrates bas-reliefs, buildings (including the Great Mosques at Mecca and Medina), musical instruments, footware, a scarab, etc., and provides tables of data concerning tides, compass corrections and temperatures, and accounts of the Islamic calendar, precious stones, weights and measures and coins. The title describes the manuscript as notes from Carsten Niebuhr's Reize naar Arabië en andere omliggende landen, a Dutch translation (1776-1778) of the German Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien ... (1774-1778), but Gerlagh apparently treats Niebuhr's complementary Beschryving van Arabie (1774, first published in German in 1772) as an additional volume of the Reize. All the illustrations and most of the text is copied from these two publications. Gerlagh does make use of other sources, however, quoting from Bernard Bredenbach, Peregrinatio in Terra Sanctum (1486); Heinrich Buenting, Itinerarium scripturae (1581); Fredrik Hasselquist, Travels in the Levant (1766); J.F. Martinet, Historie der waereld (1780-1787) and Joseph de la Porte, Nieuwe reisiger, beschryving van de oude en nieuwe weereldt (1766-1791).
The manuscript is internally in good condition. The binding is shabby, with tears in the canvas and the paper sides, the front hinge separated from the bookblock and the free endleaf at the back torn out. A good example of the fascination of leading figures in the VOC and WIC with the Arabian peninsula and vicinity and with Islamic culture. For Niebuhr and his accounts of Arabia: Hamilton, Europe and the Arab world 48; Howgego, to 1800, N24; for Gerlagh: Katalogus ... tekenwerk-schilderwerk van Johann Louis Gerlagh (1987); A. Romeijn, De stadsregering van Tholen (1577-1795) (2001), pp. 229-230.
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