Memoire sur la ville souterraine, découverte au pied du mont Vesuve [i.e. Herculaneum]

[Arthenay, Guillaume-Marie de.] Mémoire sur la ville souterraine découverte au pied du Mont Vesuve. [8], 51, [1]pp. Paris: Cl. Herissant, 1748. 187 x 121 mm. Quarter morocco, marbled boards in period style. Minor foxing but very good.

First Edition. Arthenay's pamphlet is one of the early unauthorized memoirs on the official excavation of Herculaneum, which had begun in 1738 under the patronage of King Charles VII of Naples. The Neapolitan government, anxious to prevent theft and to exploit the site's prestige value, severely restricted access to the buried city to all but its own hired scholars and prohibited the publication of any unauthorized descriptions, so despite intense international interest in the site only a few scattered reports of the excavation's findings leaked out over the following decade. The "Secret of Herculaneum" proved to be too big to keep, however, and starting in the late 1740s several unauthorized works on Herculaneum began to be published, written both by Neapolitan scholars and by foreigners such as Arthenay, a vulcanologist and amateur antiquarian who was then serving as secretary to the French ambassador at Naples. Arthenay's work is sometimes attributed to the Abbé Moussinot, whose name is tooled on the spine of this copy.