A Sketch of the Rise and Fall of the Catholic Church in Ceylon.

£750 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Very rare: a locally-printed history, tracing the activity of the church in Sri Lanka from 1518 through to the time of publication. A civil servant, author, and politician, Simon Casie Chetty (1807-1860) “was one of the earliest Orientalists and Antiquaries whom Ceylon produced. Self-taught as he was, he had acquired a thorough knowledge of the Tamil, Sinhalese, Sanskrit, Arabic and Hebrew languages besides Latin, Greek, Portuguese and Dutch” (Hettiaratchi). Not on OCLC, no copies at auction. Hettiaratchi, D.P.E., “Some Literary Understakings of the Late Simon Casie Chitty …” in The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain Ireland , Vol. 30, No. 80 (1927), pp.455-460.

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