10 Les vieux livres imprimés en écriture arabe dans la collection des Rousseau, père et fils, conservée à Saint-Pétersbourg
In: Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern EuropeSearch for other papers by Serge A. Frantsouzoff in
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Résumé
Almost two hundred years ago, the first research institution specialized in the field of Oriental Studies, i.e., the Asiatic Museum (Musée Asiatique) of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, now known as the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, was founded. The core of the Middle Eastern part of its funds was acquired by the Russian government in two lots, in 1819 and 1825, from Jean-Baptiste Louis Jacques Rousseau, who was born in the famous family of French diplomats and jewelers. It was his father, Jean-François Xavier, who had started collecting Oriental manuscripts in Ispahan, around 1757. The first lot of their family collection included not only 484 manuscripts, but also 16 early printed books. Eleven of them were identified for the first time in the Library of the Institute and they are described herewith by the author of this chapter. Among them, five were published in Aleppo in the printing press of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch (the Psalter, in two damaged copies, the Four Gospels, and the Evangeliary, in 1706, and 34 Homilies of St John Chrysostom, in 1707), three in Rome (the Four Gospels, in 1591, Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, in 1593, in the Typographia Medicea, and the Arabic-Latin Psalter, in the Typographia Savariana), and two more in Constantinople, produced by the pioneer of Islamic printing Ibrāhīm Müteferrika (the cosmographic work Ğihān-nümā and the Persan-Ottoman dictionary in two volumes Ferheng-i Shuʿūrī). As a result, this collection of early printed books gives a detailed image of the development of the art of book-printing in Arabic types in the East as well as Europe.