Author: Winckler, H. (ed.)
Title: Ex Oriente Lux. Band I.
Description: Leipzig, Eduard Pfeiffer, 1905. 8vo (21.9 x 13.8 cm). 256 pp. [(iv), 50, "iv" (recte ii), 108, 44, 48]. Contemporary half linen over marbled boards. Printed label on the spine. Edges speckled red. Original printed wrappers bound in. = Rare first volume of a periodical edited by the archeologist and historian Hugo Winckler (1863-1913), professor at Berlin University, and containing four scholarly oriental studies, by the theologist and hebraist August Wünsche (1838-1912), the explorer and promoter of oriental research Wilhelm Freiherr von Landau (1848-1908), Carl "Niebuhr", a pseudonym of the orientalist Carl Krug (1869-1927), and by Winckler himself. "A student of the languages of the ancient Middle East, he wrote extensively on Assyrian cuneiform and the Old Testament, compiled a history of Babylonia and Assyrian that was published in 1891, and translated both the Code of Hammurabi and the Amarna letters. In 1904, he was appointed professor of Oriental languages at the University of Berlin.... Otto Rank, in Art and Artist, describes Winckler as the "rediscoverer of the ancient Oriental world picture in the fifth to sixth millennium B.C. Winckler's popular description: "The whole universe is the great world, the macrocosm; its parts are small universes in themselves, microcosms. Such a ¶ microcosm* is man, who is himself an image of the universe and a perfect being. But the great universe is likewise a man, and as it is 'God,' God has human form. *'In his own image,'* therefore, was man created. This was still the belief of medieval medicine, which we know to have had (chiefly for the purpose of bleeding) a method of dividing up the human body according to the twelve signs of the zodiac (head, ram; neck, bull; arms, twins; and so on). On this `scientific' treatment of a patient was based... " (Wikipedia). Provenance: bookplate of Prof. Dr. Emil Wolff mounted on the front pastedown. Repair to the rear wrapper lower outer margin, otherwise a very good, clean copy. Apparently rare. We found no other copies on the internet.

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