[PERU - INCAN CIVILIZATION]

RIVERO Y USTARIZ, MARIANO EDUARDO DE AND TSCHUDI, JOHANN JAKOB VON. Antiguedades Peruanas. Vienna: Imprenta Imperial de la Corte y del Estado, 1851. Two volumes, bound in publisher's printed paper boards, the atlas volume with cloth spine and a lithographed illustration on the rear board. Text: (10 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches (27 x 22 cm); [1 f.], xiv, 328 pp., with a tinted lithographed frontispiece, wood-engraved illustrations in the text, and printed music. Atlas: 16 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches (42 x 55 cm); chromolithographic title and 59 tinted and chromolithographic plates, two heightened in gold and one in silver, numbered I-VI, VIa, VII-LVIII, and signed "litografia del instituto litografico de Leopoldo Müller en Viena." Bindings are worn, with rubbing, staining, and wormholes, the corners with bumping, creasing, and a loss, one spot of wax on the front board of the atlas volume, the text volume with losses at the head and foot of the spine, its contents with occasional foxing and light toning, the atlas volume's plates have varying amounts of foxing, and some wormholes, a few plates with generally short edge tears and some small marginal losses not affecting the plates, one plate with a hard crease, half of the front free endpaper is lost and the rest is creased, a complete set of this rare attractively illustrated study on Peruvian antiquities, even rarer when found as issued in the fragile original publisher's boards.

A significant, early, rare, and splendidly illustrated treatise on ancient Peru and its Incan civilization. Part of the text was first published in 1841; the present work contains the first complete edition and is offered with the first edition of the plates.

Compiled in the 1830s and 1840s by the Peruvian museum curator Mariano Eduardo de Ribero or Rivero (1798-1857) and the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi (1818-1889), the work is a comprehensive survey of all the relics, ruins, bones, artifacts and artworks of pre-Columbian Peru recorded at the time. Their work was the most thorough archaeological and anthropological review of ancient Peru yet published. Antiguedades Peruanas contains the "earliest authentic delineation of [Incan] architectural and other remains" (Sabin). The authors surveyed the history of European exploration of Peru, recounting the histories of pre-Conquest Peru (Garcilasso de la Vega, Prescott, Montesinos, etc.). There are chapters on the system of government and political institutions; the Quechuan language (several long passages in Quechua and Spanish are reprinted from a 1648 bilingual Spanish-Quechua edition of sermons by Fernando de Avendano), with a bibliography of Quechuan grammars and dictionaries; the science of the Incas - their calendar, medicine, art of navigation, mathematics and astronomy; and Incan religion, arts, and ancient monuments, especially those of the Chimu state and its capital Chan Chan (where both authors are commemorated in sites bearing their names).

The striking large lithographed plates, printed by Leopold Muller at Vienna, show mummified skeletons with their knees pulled close to their chests, many still in their burial garments, including two views of an infant with a peculiarly elongated skull (a condition which the authors claimed to have seen often and which they attributed to an inherited trait rather than to any kind of mechanical binding or disease); burial objects including the typical Incan "Conopas" (containers shaped like animals), tools, musical instruments, of which the Peruvian whistling bottles served both as musical instruments and containers for liquids, other ceramic objects, textiles, tombs, burial sites, temples, and views and plans of Incan palaces. Sabin 71642-43 ("a work of great importance on the ethnology and antiquities of Peru"); Leclerc Bibliotheca Americana 3497.