I opened F.W. von Bissing’s work with a certain feeling of melancholy, for it was a thing that I had hoped to do myself. Ebers had suggested to Bruckmann, the publisher, that he should entrust the task to me, and I was on the point of arranging with him when the preparations for an Orientalist Congress to meet at Paris in 1897 deprived me of the leisure left me by my lectures and the printing of my “History,” and I was forced to give up the project. Herr von Bissing, who was less occupied then than I was, consented to hazard the adventure, and no one could have been better equipped than he was to carry it through. The seeking of materials, the execution of typographical clichés, the composition of the text and its careful setting forth exacted eight years of travelling and continuous labour. Bissing issued the first part at the end of 1905, and five other parts have quickly followed, forming almost the half of the work, seventy-two plates folio, and the portions of the explanatory text belonging to the plates.
