The Ruins

A traveller wanders among the ruins of Palmyra, meditating on the empires that rose and fell across the ancient Near East, until a spectral Genius appears to answer his questions: why do nations decline, and can reason ever agree on what justice and government owe to each other? The dialogue widens into a survey of history's own recurring pattern of tyranny and collapse, and then, in the book's most notorious chapter, into a comparative anatomy of ancient religion — thirteen "systems" of worship, from the elements and stars to symbols, dualism, and a Persian, Indian, Jewish, and finally Christian variant of the same underlying idea — offered as evidence that every religion springs from the same human sources rather than divine revelation.

Volney wrote The Ruins in 1791, drawing on a journey through Egypt and Syria some years before, and its argument for reason and natural law over religious authority made it one of the Revolution's most widely read and most attacked books; the Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley published a pamphlet against it in 1797, and Volney's public reply is included here. The standard English translation, published in Paris in 1802, was begun by Thomas Jefferson — who withdrew his name from it for the sake of his own political career — and completed by his friend Joel Barlow, working under Volney's own supervision; this Bibliomancer edition follows that text via an 1890 New York reprint.

This Bibliomancer edition presents The Ruins complete in twenty-four chapters, Volney's own prefatory material, Count Daru's contemporary biographical notice, Volney's 1797 public letter answering Dr. Priestley, and, bundled in this edition as it was in 1802, Volney's shorter companion treatise The Law of Nature, a catechism of ethics grounded in natural law rather than revelation.