Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/24

8 and that of the Nabathæans, the title of Egyptian Agriculture was frequently substituted for Nabathæan Agriculture, and the editor of the Greek Geoponica, J. N. Niclas, even supposed, in 1781, that “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture” was nothing but a translation of the work of which he published  the original text.

A more exact idea was given of “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture,” when Don Josef Antonio Banqueri published at Madrid, in 1802, the Treatise on Agriculture of Ibn-el-Awwam, which is a kind of abridgment from “The Nabathæan Agriculture.” But the historical interest of the original work entirely disappeared in the abridgment of Ibn-el-Awwam.

It was my learned brother, M. Quatremère, who first studied in its original text