[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 recent French half dark green morocco and matching marbled paper over boards. Text volume: 11 x 9 inches (28 x 23 cm). Atlas: 16 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches ( 42 x 54 cm). Text: [1 f.], xiv, 328 pp., with a tinted lithographed frontispiece, wood-engraved illustrations in the text, and printed music. The atlas volume with a chromolithographic title and 58 tinted and chromolithographic plates, two heightened in gold. Some light foxing to plates and to frontispiece of text volume; soft crease in plates 1-2, otherwise a fine copy.
A significant, rare and splendidly illustrated pioneering 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.