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Summary
Author: Gordon, Alexander
Title: An essay towards explaining the hieroglyphical figures. on the coffin of the ancient mummy belonging to Capt.William Lethieullier ; An essay towards explaining the antient hieroglyphical figures, on the Egyptian mummy, in the museum of Doctor Mead, Physician in Ordinary to His Majesty ; Proposals for engraving and publishing by subscription, a supplement to Montfaucon's Egyptian Antiquities.
Publication: London, printed for the author 1737, 1737 (but plates issued 1733 onwards) ; January 1733/4.
Price: £5,500
Reference: 10037
Full Description
Folio. (4) + 16pp ; iv + 10 + (2)pp ; with 25 engraved plates numbered I-XXV (plates XI and XII in duplicate) ; printed leaf, printed on recto only, incorporating printed receipt form at foot, made out in ink to William Jones (tutor to the 2nd Earl of Macclesfield) and signed in ink by Alexander Gordon. Contemporary boards with vellum spine. From the library of the Earls of Macclesfield, with mid nineteenth century Macclesfield bookplate, dated 1860, and armorial Macclesfield blind stamp on first three leaves (as customary with books from this library). A fresh, clean, untrimmed copy.
An excellent untrimmed copy of all that was published of Alexander Gordon's intended folio-size publication on Egyptian antiquities. The author, Alexander Gordon (c.1692-1754), an Aberdeen University graduate, had a complicated career which included spells as an operatic tenor in Italy and London, as Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries of London, and as Secretary to the Governor of South Carolina (he was eventually to settle at Charleston, South Carolina, where he died in an unexpected state of prosperity a few days after 22 August 1754). He had made his reputation as an antiquary in the mid 1720s by the publication of Itinerarium Septentrionale, a handsome illustrated volume devoted to Roman remains in Scotland, but by the 1730s he had become interested in Egyptology, and embarked on the production of the present volume. The earliest printed proposal for it, issued in April 1733, seems not to survive, but a subsequent printed proposal leaf bound at the end of the present volume (not recorded in ESTC and apparently the only surviving copy) shows that Gordon had originally intended to issue twenty engraved plates of Egyptian antiquities without any accompanying text. By January 1733/4, when the revised proposals were issued, two of these plates had been distributed to subscribers, and ten more were ready to be distributed, but Gordon was now promising that there would be twenty-four plates and an accompanying descriptive text in the same format as the English language edition of Montfaucon's Antiquities. In the event, twenty-five plates were to be engraved and distributed, but the only descriptive text that Gordon was to produce were the two essays present here, respectively devoted to the Lethieullier mummy (now in the British Museum) and to the Mead mummy (now in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow).The plates however remain of real interest to scholars, for as well as illustrating the mummies they illustrate statues, carved reliefs, canopic jars, amulets, ushabti figurines and other Egyptian antiquities then in English collections, including those of the Coke family and of the Earls of Oxford and Halifax, and they therefore provide useful evidence on provenances and on the early stages of the import of Egyptian antiquities into Britain.Gordon's book is very scarce outside older English libraries, and the only ESTC records for it in US libraries are for copies at the Getty Institute and at the Library Company of Philadelphia.