An Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet. By Richard Payne Knight

1791

Tall 4to. pp. viii, 136, [2], with nine full-page plates (the last misnumbered ‘XI’) bound at the beginning, a folding plan facing p. 106, and a terminal errata list. Signatures: A-S4. Bound in contemporary mottled boards. First edition, containing Knight’s celebrated dismissal of the spurious inscriptional discoveries of the Abbé Fourmont, and the well-merited mockery of his pseudo-scholarly interpretations (‘as undoubted specimens of the most antient writing extant’), that set off the international controversy long following Fourmont’s death (Section VI, pp. 111-136). Knight is unsparing about the credulity of the French academicians, including Caylus (see Bib# 807564/Fr# 1302.3 in this collection) and Barthélemy (Bib# 372190/Fr# 1302.2): ‘Nothing exposes ignorance so effectively as an unsuccessful attempt at scientific accuracy [...] when I look over [the reported inscriptions], I am inclined to think that that I have said more than enough to detect them; but when I consider the pertinacious obstinacy with which forgeries, equally bungling, have been lately adduced as authentic compositions of remote antiquity [...] I am apprehensive that I have said too little.’ A milestone in the tradition of indignant, annihilatory response to unveiled imposture. <a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/permalink/01JHU_INST/1lu78g9/alma991008853889707861" rel="nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a>