BASINER, Theodor Friedrich Julius. Naturwissenschaftliche Reise durch die Kirgisensteppe nach Chiwa.

Eyewitness Account of the Khanate of Khiva

BASINER, Theodor Friedrich Julius. Naturwissenschaftliche Reise durch die Kirgisensteppe nach Chiwa. St Petersburg: The Imperial Academy of Science. 1848.

8vo. Contemporary half calf with marbled sides, spine decorated and lettered in blind, edges sprinkled blue; pp. [6], xv, [1 (blank)], 379, [1 (blank)]; lithographic portrait frontispiece by H. Schmid after E. Hau, printed by K. Pohl, 3 lithographic plates after W. Pape et al., double-page lithographic plan of Khiva, and one hand-coloured lithographic folding map; extremities a little rubbed and bumped, lightly browned, one plate trimmed touching caption, folding map lightly browned and with short, skilfully repaired tears, internally a very good copy; presentation inscription to August Nöschel to front flyleaf; annotations (by Nöschel?) to upper pastedown in ink and to text in pencil; inkstamp of Olga Ahnger to front free endpaper.

First edition, scarce in commerce, of this eyewitness account of the Russian expedition from Orenburg across the Great Steppe to Uzbekistan.

Basiner’s Naturwissenschaftliche Reise was published as the fifteenth volume of the scholarly periodical Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Russischen Reiches und der angrenzenden Länder Asiens. His account describes the city of Khiva in western Uzbekistan – known for its inner town, Itchan Kala, which is surrounded by ten-metre brick walls and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site – and the surrounding region. Khiva was a major trading hub along the Silk Road and was historically the ‘last resting-place of caravans before crossing the desert to Iran’ (UNESCO, online).

Botanist Theodor Basiner (1816–1862) was born in Tartu (present-day Estonia) and studied at the Imperial University of Dorpat between 1836 and 1840; he was subsequently a conservator at St Petersburg’s Botanical Garden and became its librarian in 1845. Between 1842 and 1843 he was a member of Grigory Danilewsky’s Russian Expedition of 1842, in which Danilewsky and his men, under the orders of Tsar Nicholas I, crossed the Kazakh (Kirghiz) Steppe to the Khanate of Khiva to stabilise relations with the Khan, survey unmapped areas of Central Asia, and guarantee the release of captured Russian slaves. This expedition was a follow-up to the failed Khivan campaign of 1839–40, a Russian attempt to conquer the Khanate of Khiva (in which Vasily Perovsky and his men were forced to turn back halfway after losing most of their camels).

Basiner describes the progress of the expedition itself in the first part of the work, and the second half gives a description of the Khanate of Khiva. His Naturwissenschaftliche Reise contains one of the earliest detailed maps of the Aral Sea and the Khanate of Khiva, preceding the Aral Sea maps of both Yakov Khanikoff (1851) and Alexey Butakov (1853).

Provenance: presented by the author to Estonian physicist August Nöschel (1809–1877); the scattered annotations to the text in pencil may be in his hand. Nöschel studied at the University of Tartu, Estonia’s national university, from 1828 to 1833, and taught physics in Tartu from 1840 to 1841. He wrote on the Caucasus, examined the geology and hydrography of Orenburg, and died in Tbilisi on his last journey.

Yakushi (3rd ed.) B153 for the modern reprint only.

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