Description

4°, [14], CLXXII, 603 pp., [14],  contemporary vellum binding with gilt embossed coat of arms on the covers and manuscript title on the back (Very Good, paper with light foxing, endpapers with small tears and tiny loss of paper, old bookmark mounted on the inner side of the cover, old manuscript annotations on end papers and in the margin of title page, cover slightly dusty). 

Thomas van Erpe, with a Latin name Thomas Erpenius (1584 – 1624), was a Dutch Orientalist, who founded a printing press with Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, Ethiopian, and Turkish type in Leiden, South Holland. 

The first edition of van Erpe’s Arabic grammar was published in 1613. After a great success of the book, further enlarged editions were published, such as Rudimenta linguae Arabicae (1620), Grammatica Ebraea generalis (1621) and after van Erpe’s premature death Grammatica Chaldaica et Syria (1628). Our edition here includes reprinted text on grammar from the 1656 edition, but includes for the first time a Latin translation of a famous anthology of Arabic poetry the Hamasah (Hamasa) by Abu Tammam (788–845).

Abu Tammam was born in Syria to Christian parents, but converted to Muslim. His work the Hamasah (Arabic: حماسة‎‎, “exhortation”) known as one of the greatest anthologies of Arabic literature ever written. 

The Hamsah text was edited and translated by Albert Schultens (1686 –1750), an orientalist, specialist in Hebre wand Arabic, professor at the Univerity of Leiden and the chief teacher of the Arabic language in the whole of the Europe. 

References:  ilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). “Schultens, Albert”. New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead; Ibn Ab̄i Tahir Ṭāyfūr and Arabic writerly culture a ninth-century bookman in Baghdad, Routledge Curzon Studies in Arabic and Middle-Eastern Literatures: A Ninth-century Bookman in Baghdad, By Shawkat M. Toorawa, p. 94.