A copy interleaved by a polyglot nineteenth century amateur scholar of cuneiform, Frederick Wood, who has included his own versions of Sanskrit and other alphabets.
Large octavo, half calf over textured green cloth; spine relaid using almost all of the original backstrip and achieving an attractive effect. Marbled endpapers and bookplate showing the library of ‘Frederick A. Wood, Highfields, Chew Magna, Somerset’ with handwritten shelf numbers to the margin. Red speckled edges. Rawlinson’s printed text is complete with the folding frontispiece, [4] pp84.
Wood’s manuscript interleaves are on a smaller paper stock, mounted on stubs. The first section of 26 manuscript pages appears before the main text and sets out Sanskrit, Nimrud Obelisk and other alphabets, neatly in columns. At page 14 a further 16 pages of Persian, Arabic and further alphabets are inserted, with additional inserts at page 52 (6 pages of scholarly commentary); 54, 58, 74 and after the printed text finishes - about 100 small octavo pages of Wood’s manuscript in all.
Research into cuneiform became an abiding passion of western scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century with Rawlinson among the pioneers in the field. Unusually assiduous and knowledgable Frederick Wood exemplifies this intellectual enthusiasm even as he lived out his life in rural Somerset where he died in 1904. His only published work which was a natural history of his Somerset village, Chew Magna. This manuscript reveals a systematic near-obsessive interest in cuneiform which speaks of Victorian intellectual tastes.
