Javakhishvili, Ivane. The Basic Questions of the History of Georgian Music (Kartuli Musikis Istoriis Dziritadi Sakitkhebi) 1938. In Georgian.

ჯავახიშვილი, ივანე. ქართული მუსიკის ისტორიის ძირითადი საკითხები.
თბილისი : გამომცემლობა „ფედერაცია", 1938. 382 გვერდი, 2 ფერადი და 29 შავ-თეთრი ილუსტრაცია ცალკე ფურცლებზე ; 23 სანტიმეტრი.
მაგარი გამომცემლობის ყდა. ტირაჟი 4 000 ცალი.
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Javakhishvili, Ivane. The Basic Questions of the History of Georgian Music.
Tbilisi: "Federatsia" Publishing House, 1938. 382 pp., with 2 color and 29 black-and-white plates on separate leaves ; 23 cm.
Original publisher's hardcover binding. Print run of 4,000 copies.
Binding good: corners slightly worn. Text block good: age-toning throughout; all 31 plates fully preserved.

Ivane Javakhishvili (1876-1940) was the preeminent Georgian historian of the twentieth century, founder and first rector of Tbilisi State University, and the principal architect of modern Georgian source studies, paleography, and diplomatics. In this 1938 monograph, issued two years before his death, Javakhishvili undertook the first systematic scholarly treatment of the history of Georgian music, drawing on Old Georgian literary and liturgical sources, medieval manuscript miniatures, foreign travelers' accounts, and surviving folk instruments to reconstruct the terminology, modal theory, and instrumental culture of Georgian musical tradition from antiquity through the early modern period. The volume remains, in the assessment of later Georgian ethnomusicologists, the most comprehensive study of historical written sources on Georgian music and a foundational reference still cited in current scholarship on Georgian chant, polyphony, and folk instruments. Its extensive plate section, two color reproductions of thirteenth-century Georgian manuscript miniatures depicting mounted musicians and court scenes, together with twenty-nine black-and-white photographic plates of surviving folk instruments such as the panduri and chonguri, makes the volume as valuable for organology and manuscript illumination as for musicological argument. Issued from the "Federatsia" press in an edition of 4,000 copies, the book predates by more than half a century the 1990 second edition and has never appeared in translation. Published the same year Javakhishvili was compelled to step down from his university post, it also carries biographical weight within the arc of his career, and is of interest to collectors of Georgian and Caucasian scholarship, historians of Soviet-era academic publishing, and specialists in Georgian musicology and manuscript studies.