Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens mit einer Blüthenlese aus zweyhundert Persischen Dichtern

First edition of Joseph von Hammer's major history of Persian belles-lettres, published in Vienna in 1818 by Heubner und Volke. Large quarto, XII and 432 pages, with an engraved portrait of the author as frontispiece, a plate of music bound between pages 272 and 273, and an index. The work is dedicated to Silvestre de Sacy.

Contemporary half polished tan calf, smooth spine decorated with gilt fillets, chain tools and floral ornaments, saffron-coloured boards, marbled edges. Joints split at foot and more slightly at head. A handsome copy with generous margins.

Hammer's portrait, engraved in 1817, bears a caption associating its production with Count Wacław Rzewuski. The reference is particularly significant in the history of the work itself. Hammer had formed a close friendship in Vienna with the Polish aristocrat, Orientalist, traveller, and future explorer of Arabia, whose support proved instrumental in the foundation of the Fundgruben des Orients. Established in 1809 and published from 1810 onwards, the journal became one of the earliest sustained European periodicals devoted to Oriental languages, literatures, and antiquities.

The dedication to Silvestre de Sacy places the work within another branch of the same scholarly network. In Paris, Sacy was then the dominant figure in European Oriental studies; in Vienna, Hammer had received intensive training in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish at the Oriental Academy from the late 1780s, before embarking on a diplomatic career that took him to Constantinople, Egypt, and Jassy. He had also worked with Joseph von Jenisch, then engaged on the edition of Meninski's great Arabic, Persian, and Turkish dictionary. The presence in the same volume of the names of Sacy and Rzewuski thus evokes the French and Austro-Polish poles of a shared European Orientalist milieu.

The Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens is both a history of Persian literature and a substantial anthology of two hundred poets. Hammer brings together biographical notices, German translations, and commentary in an attempt to provide European readers with a broad survey of the Persian poetic tradition. A plate of music, presenting a Persian song in transliteration with its German translation, reflects the encyclopaedic scope of the work, extending beyond literary history to language, prosody, and the modes through which Persian culture was transmitted.

The importance of the book is further demonstrated by its role in the making of Goethe's West-Eastern Divan. Hammer's complete German translation of Hafez, published in 1812-1813, had already played a decisive part in Goethe's discovery of the Persian poet; the Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens, appearing in 1818, subsequently became one of the principal sources for the Notes and Essays accompanying the Divan. Goethe drew upon it extensively for the historical and literary information with which he situated his own work within the tradition of Persian poetry and the broader literary cultures of the Islamic East.

The present copy thus brings together, within the physical form of a single book, several of the figures who helped introduce Persian literature into early 19th-century European culture: Silvestre de Sacy as dedicatee, Rzewuski through Hammer's portrait, and Goethe through his documented use of the work. Preserved in its contemporary binding and complete with portrait and musical plate, it is a particularly coherent witness to the scholarly network through which Persian poetry entered the European literary imagination.