*approved The word fragment "rato" likely completes "comprobato" or "approbato" from the previous page, meaning "confirmed" or "approved." (since it has been reviewed by Our command through the censorship of the most learned Men, and has earned great glory by the applause it deservedly received for its abstruse and previously unknown treatment of a most difficult subject); furthermore, when We discovered that the great expense required for its production stood in the way of it seeing the light of day: We considered it Our duty to assist this now-mature labor original: partui iam maturo manum supponere; literally "to place a hand under a birth already mature," a metaphor for supporting the final stages of a project. and provide that a Work conceived and labored upon through so many years of nighttime studies should no longer lie hidden in darkness, but should see the light as soon as possible, and pour forth through its own brilliance that which is through the light of Wisdom. And therefore, since We had already previously assigned an annual income to the Author as a subsidy for his studies, beyond the type-sets of Oriental languages Kircher's work required specialized fonts for Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, and other languages, which were rare and expensive at the time. necessary for printing the Work, We have also ordered all the necessary expenses for bringing the Work to light to be abundantly supplied from Our Imperial Treasury; by this very act, for the sake of Our zeal for restoring the knowledge of such excellent learning (which Our predecessors the Caesars, the first erectors of the Obelisks in the City Referring to the Roman Emperors who originally brought obelisks from Egypt to Rome., as and in recent times some of the Supreme Pontiffs The Popes, particularly Sixtus V, who re-erected the obelisks in Rome and hoped to decipher them. seeking with truly laudable effort, have until now been unable to achieve) We wished a monument of some kind to exist; as an incentive for the learned to labor tirelessly in the search for Wisdom, and as an example for Kings and Princes to promote such laudable labors of learned Men with the greatest zeal. Furthermore, offering Our Imperial favor to the mentioned Father Athanasius Kircher, We kindly take him under Our guardianship and protection, as one who has deserved well of Us and Our August House, by the power of these Our open letters, which were given in Our Imperial City of Regensburg original: Ratisbonae on the twenty-fourth day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred and fifty-four, in the eighteenth year of Our Roman reign, the twenty-ninth of the Hungarian, and the twenty-seventh of the Bohemian.

Ferdinand.