Chronicle
Saggio di storia americana
Not translated into English
Filippo Salvatore Gilii · 1780
Synopsis
A comprehensive work on the Spanish provinces of Tierra Firme, their natural, civil and sacred history, and the languages of the Orinoco. The missionary records what his Tamanaco interlocutors tell him: long ago the whole earth sank into the water, and only one man and one woman survived on Mount Tamanacu, near the Cuchivero, and remade humanity with the fruit of a palm tree. Amalivaca, who came by sea, lived among them for a long time and engraved the figures on the painted stone near La Encaramada, before taking his canoe back to the other shore of the sea from which he had come.
Context
The work appeared in Rome from Luigi Perego Salvioni, in four volumes adorned with maps of the river and of New Granada. The author deals there with linguistic areas, loanwords, word order and the disappearance of languages, and groups those of the Orinoco into nine mother languages, including the Maipure family; linguistics credits him with having based on sound correspondences a kinship between languages three years before William Jones. Antonio Tovar translated the first three volumes into Spanish in 1965, and Sotheby's recalls that Humboldt reportedly used it for his expedition of 1799 to 1804.
Who it is for
Four volumes in eighteenth-century Italian, partly translated into Spanish, to be read in sections: the languages, the customs, the natural history.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by linguistics as a foundational work in the study of South American languages, and reissued in Spanish in Venezuela.