Bréal, Michel

LES TABLES EUGUBINES: TEXTE, TRADUCTION ET COMMENTAIRE, AVEC UNE GRAMMAIRE, UNE INTRODUCTION HISTORIQUE ET UN INDEX — ALBUM [Text Volume Not Included]

Paris: E. Vieweg, Libraire-Éditeur, 1875. First Edition. Folio, [8] pages plus thirteen plates (of which three are double-leaf.) In Good plus condition. Rebound in half leather with brown cloth boards (original blue paper wraps tipped-in) and gilt-tooled titling to spine. Spine has small tear near its middle exposing the binding below, heavy rubbing to gilt titling, and chipping and rubbing throughout. Boards have bumping to fore corners with some material loss, chipping to leather, and rubbing and scuffing throughout; front board has light rippling to cloth in its lower half; rear board has a remnant of a paper label near the spine. Text block has a gilt top edge and marbled endpapers; has tape repairs to hinges, a small tear to lower edge of front free endpaper, rubbing to endpapers, bookplates of Richard William Church and Joshua Whatmough to front endpaper, scuffing to original blue paper wraps, and age-toning and light foxing throughout. Text in French. Shelved in Room A octavo overflow.

1417020

Special Collections

Price: $850

NOTES

The work is the second volume of a major 19th-century academic study of the Iguvine Tablets (Tabulae Eugubinae), a series of seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in Gubbio (ancient Iguvium), Italy. Written in the extinct Umbrian language (using both Etruscan/Umbrian and Latin alphabets), these inscriptions detail religious rituals, sacrifices, and priestly duties of the Atiedian Brotherhood. The bookplates in this copy trace its provenance from Richard William Church (1815–1890,) late Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (who likely acquired it near the time of its publication,) to Joshua Whatmough (1897–1964,) an English-born American comparative philologist and linguist. According to the year on his bookplate, he acquired this volume in 1925, just a year before moving to Harvard University, where he chaired the Department of Comparative Philology (later Linguistics) for nearly four decades and was considered one of the 20th century's foremost experts in ancient Italic dialects.