Folio. Atlas: [3], half title, loose plates numbered 70-144 of which 6 in colour, fitted in original cloth backed printed boards, hinges slightly weak, light foxing throughout, mostly to margins, Ex-Libris Charles Kettaneh with bookplate verso of front cover, Haut Commissariat de la République Française en Syrie et au Liban. Service des Antiquités. Bibliothèque Archéologique et Historique, Tome V, Librairie Orientaliste, Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1928.

Synopsis

Guillaume de Jerphanion, (1877- 1948) was a French Jesuit, epigrapher, geographer, linguistic, photographer,archaeologist and Byzantinist.
As early as 1903, Guillaume had obtained permission to leave for Armenia, to attend the college of Tokat. He studied Turkish and Armenian while teaching French and Mathematics to young Armenians. 
During his first stay in Asia Minor, he drew the first large-scale map of the area. Above all, he discovered, in the company of an elder, Father Gransault, the rock-carved churches of the Cappadocia region of Turkey.
This region has fantastic landscapes unique to the world, to which are added the historical riches: in this soft stone settled a troglodytic habitat. Cappadocia is home to several hundred churches and chapels dug in the Middle Ages by Byzantine monks who decorated them with no less care than the free standing stone monuments. The oldest churches were excavated in the 6th century. Cappadocia is the only natural museum of Byzantine frescoes in the world.
Guillaume devoted more than thirty years of his life to the exploration and study of the rock churches of Cappadocia. Whether naive or sophiscated, their frescoes, in which biblical scenes and popular hagiography were revived, were not unknown to archaeologists, but Guillaume was the first to make an inventory of them and place them in the history of Byzantine art. He discovered, inventoried, and classified, in fact, all these cave churches and their paintings.
On the history of Eastern Christian art, Father Guillaume published several pamphlets, as well as a remarkable five-volume work entitled, “A New Province of Byzantine Art: The Cappadocian Rock Churches”. This monumental work was unanimously praised by the specialists, notably by the renowned Byzantinist Louis Brehier, and immediately placed Father Guillaume among the renowned archaeologists. It has also attracted worldwide attention on the region of Cappadocia.