Travels in Mesopotamia, by James Silk Buckingham. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. English. First edition (a Quarto edition was published in the same year). The book describes the travels of the English traveler James Silk Buckingham in Mesopotamia in the 1820s. He travelled to Aleppo, Urfa (identified with Ur Kaśdim), Mardin, Diyarbakır, Nisibis, Sinjar, Mosul, the ruins of Nineveh, Erbil, Baghdad and elsewhere. Buckingham writes about the archeological sites he visited and describes in detail the lives and customs of the locals. Chapters open with illustrations of towns, landscapes and various sites. The book features two lithographic plates showing the ruins of Babylon, and a large map of Mesopotamia (folding plate). James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855), a traveler, journalist, publisher of several journals and a member of the British Parliament; born in Cornwell. Published several books about his travels in India, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor and America, which were a great success. Following his struggle for the freedom of the press in India, and his criticism of the British East India Company and colonialism which he published in The Calcutta Journal, he was deported from India in 1823. In the 1830s he was elected a member of the British Parliament and was one of the supporters of the temperance movement, which objected to the consumption of alcohol. In the preface to this book, Buckingham refers to several travelers who preceded him in their travels to Mesopotamia (p. X): Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, the German Leonhardt Rauwolff, the Italian Pietro Della Valle, the French Otter and the "celebrated Danish Engineer" Niebuhr. Buckingham claims that their notes on their travels in the area were imprecise and during the century that preceded his travels, "no Traveller of eminence… has had any opportunity of examining the country between the Euphrates and the Tigris". [III]-XVI, 328, 327-328, 329-571, [1] pp. + [3] plates (one folding map and two lithographic plates), 28 cm. Good condition. Stains. Small tears to edges of folding map. Open tear to edge of one page, not affecting text. Tape for reinforcement to gutter between front endpaper and map. Bookplates to inside front board and front endpaper. Wear and abrasions to binding. Small tears to spine. Front board mostly detached. Pieces of tape for reinforcement to spine.