LABORDE Léon Emmanuel Simon Joseph Voyage de l’Arabie Pétrée.

Blackmer, 929 ; Nissen, 2335 ; Tobler, p.150; Rohricht, 1731 ; not in Abbey.

First edition of one of the most beautiful illustrated works on the Orient.

On 22 August 1822, a young Swiss orientalist traveller, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, rediscovered ancient Petra, the forgotten capital of the Nabataeans. On a mission for the British, he was supposed to travel to Cairo to explore North Africa, but Burckhardt diverted his route, despite the hostility of the inhabitants, in order to visit the ancient ruins in the Wadi Moussa region (Jordan). Eight years later, it was the Marquis Léon de Laborde, a skilled draughtsman, accompanied by the engineer Linant de Bellefonds, who explored, studied and drew one of the first iconographic representations of Petra, ‘The Rose’, and its ancient city carved into the rock, which for a long time was the centre of immense trade between Arabia and Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.

In the tradition of 19th-century travellers, Léon de Laborde was twenty years old when he accompanied his father and two friends to the Near East on one of the Grand Tours of the time (1826-1827), from which he drew material for two travelogues, in Syria (1837) and Asia Minor (1838). But the taste for adventure seized him once again and it was with Maurice-Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds (Pasha Linant-Bey), then in the service of Mehmet Ali, who had already travelled throughout Arabia, that he organised an expedition to ‘Arabia Petraea’. The publication of the extensive material gathered in Petra introduced the Western world to the famous tombs carved into the rock of the caravan city. These published views of Petra were the first to reach a European audience.

The work presented above, a sumptuous album, was sold by subscription in Paris from 1830 to 1833.

Some browning but generally a very fine copy.