4to. Latin and Arabic text, xvi, 8pp., +314 pp., [2], 19th century half morocco with cloth boards, lightly soiled and rubbed round edges, title gilt on raised spine, gilt monograms of Stirling Maxwell to boards, marbled endpapers, top edges gilt, edited with a preface by N. G. Schroeder, small and faint damp stain to upper margin of pages 73-90, light soiling to top margin of page 298, 2 bookplates on front endpapers, otherwise a very good copy with wide margins, Sumptibus Auctoris, Lugduni Batavorum, first edition, 1795.

Synopsis

A rare collection of over 450 proverbs in Arabic with translations and commentary in Latin which was published posthumously shortly after Schultens’s death in 1793. Schultens was a professor of Hebrew and Arabic and taught in London, Amsterdam and Leiden. Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Maidânî published his book Majma’ al-Amthal (“A Collection of Proverbs”), containing 4766 proverbs in an alphabetical order. According to a note in the author’s introduction, the work was based on 50 other books containing proverbs. While other nations were still coining phrases, the Arabs were compiling them. Although the proverb is by its nature anonymous, learned tradition often tried to find authors for them. Many proverbial sayings are therefore attributed to the Prophet and his Companions. The Amthal al-Nabi, which circulated outside the canonical collections of the traditions was collected by Ibn Khallad al-Ramhurmuzi and Abu Hilal al-Askari and al-Maidânî. When the leading British Orientalist William Jones received Schultens’s just published Anthologia Sentitarium Arabicarum in 1772, he complimented on the translation and notes of the Leiden scholar, and offered to help Schultens during his stay at Wadham College, Oxford to study Pococke’s manuscript of al- Maidânî’s Majma’ al-Amthal.
Provenance: Bookplates of William Stirling-Maxwell, Victor De Guinzbourg, and Keir House to pastedowns and front endpaper. From the collection of Robert Easton.