Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas, dans la Turquie,
l'Asie, Sourie, Palestine, Haute et Basse Egypte, &c. Où l'on trouvera des Remarques très-curieuses... Fait en M.DCCXIV, &c. par Ordre de Louis XIV. Amsterdam Steenhouwer & Uytwere 1720
Third edition, two volumes, 12mo, pp.[xx], 436, [7, contents]; [ii, title], 345, [4, contents], [23, adverts.]; 2 folding maps, 32 plates, 19 of which folding. A very good copy in contemporary vellum, red speckled edges, lettering direct to spine. Vellum has a few stains to boards but otherwise binding tight and strong. Internally clean apart from small note to front end-papers of volume 1. Both maps have small 1cm tears to margins.
Atabey 733; Blackmer 1038; Brunet 19953; Ibrahim-Hilmy I, 394; Tobler 122.
Paul Lucas (1664-1737) was a French merchant, antiquarian, and traveller. He came to the attention of Louis XIV after returning in 1696, from serving in the Venetian army, with armfuls of looted antiquities. The king bought many for his personal collection, and sent Lucas on three voyages to the middle east to find him more. In this, his third and last between 1714 and 1717, he travelled through Turkey and Palestine to Egypt. He spent most of his time exploring Egypt and attempting to discover new sites ripe for archaeology and valuable artefacts. This edition, published a year after the first, was probably pirated like many others out of Amsterdam. Many of the plates richly depict architecture including the pyramids of Egypt as well as reproducing numerous Egyptian statues and hieroglyphs.