Description de l'Égypte

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Description de l'Egypte arrived in the world in 1809 not as a book but as an event. It was the largest published work on earth at the time of its release. Its biggest pages, the so-called Mammutfolio sheets, measured one meter by eighty-one centimeters. Some plates packed more than one hundred individual engravings of plants or animals onto a single sheet. The work would not be complete until 1829, twenty years after that first volume appeared.

  Behind this monument stood an unlikely partnership: roughly 160 civilian scholars and scientists who had followed Napoleon's army into Egypt in 1798, alongside approximately 2,000 artists and technicians, including 400 engravers who would later turn their field drawings into publishable plates. They called the scholars the savants. They were not soldiers. They were naturalists, mathematicians, engineers, and artists sent to catalog an entire civilization, living and ancient, while a war went on around them.

  What drove them to Egypt, how they survived long enough to fill twenty-three volumes, and what the world made of what they brought back are the questions that follow.

• 2. Scholars Under Fire

  ›

  In late August 1798, Napoleon ordered the founding of the Institut d'Egypte inside the palace of Hassan-Kashif on the outskirts of Cairo, with the mathematician Gaspard Monge installed as president. The institute was modeled deliberately on the Institut de France back in Paris. It housed a library, laboratories, workshops, and the savants' growing Egyptian collections.

  Many of the savants had been drawn from the Institut de France itself. About a third of them would eventually become members of the new Institut d'Egypte. The workshop was not merely academic. It supplied both the French army and the researchers with necessary equipment, and it fabricated new instruments to replace those lost when the French fleet was destroyed at Aboukir Bay in August 1798 during the Battle of the Nile. A Cairo riot in October of the same year created further losses.

  To keep information flowing, the institute published two periodicals: a journal called La Decade egyptienne and a newspaper, the Courrier de l'Egypte. Both disseminated news about the French occupation, the army's activities, and the institute's own work. The vision of gathering all this into a single comprehensive publication came into focus in November 1798, when Joseph Fourier was given the task of uniting the reports from different scientific disciplines for eventual publication.

  When the army withdrew from Egypt in 1801, the savants were careful. They carried out large quantities of unpublished notes, drawings, and smaller artifacts, smuggling them past British inspection.

• 3. Twenty Years in the Making

  ›

  Jean Antoine Chaptal, the French Minister of the Interior, set the bureaucratic machinery in motion in February 1802. By Napoleon's decree, a commission was established to manage the enormous quantity of material the savants had brought home. The raw material was vast: it included the already-published La Decade, the Courrier de l'Egypte, the four-volume Memoires sur l'Egypte published between 1798 and 1801, and an abundance of notes and illustrations from the scholars.

  The commission adopted what the source calls an "apparently haphazard modus operandi." When enough plates or text on a given subject were ready, that portion was published. The result was that title-page dates and actual publication dates often diverged sharply. Book 8 of the first edition carries the year 1809 on its cover, but its accepted publication date is 1826. The geographical volume bears dates of 1818 and 1826 on its pages but was not printed before 1828.

  The first test volumes of engravings were presented to Napoleon in January 1808. The work's authority shifted as French political life shifted around it. Early volumes appeared by order of the emperor. Later ones by order of the king. The last simply by order of the government. By the time the final volume appeared in 1829, Napoleon himself had been dead for eight years.

  A second edition, known as the Panckoucke edition after its publisher Charles Louis Fleury Panckoucke, expanded the text into thirty-seven volumes and printed it in a smaller format. Large plates were folded to fit the new size. The second edition was produced at lower cost and printed in black and white, though its frontispiece was rendered in full color.

• 4. Scale and Beauty

  ›

  The first edition's ten volumes of plates contained 894 plates total, derived from more than 3,000 original drawings. The natural history volumes alone accounted for the majority of that count. Thirty-eight of the plates were hand-colored. Variants of the work existed: a copy once presented to Bernardino Drovetti, the French consul general in Egypt from 1802 to 1814 and again from 1821 to 1826, ran to 29 volumes, while a standard first edition contains 23.

  The Mammutfolio volumes, also called Elephant plates, were a category of their own. Two of the twenty-three first-edition volumes were printed at that one-meter-by-eighty-one-centimeter scale, containing plates from the antiquities and modern Egypt sections. The cartographic section, the Carte de l'Egypte, held approximately 50 map plates. It was the first triangulation-based map of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine ever made, and it served as the foundation for most maps of the region throughout much of the nineteenth century.

  The plates have found new audiences since then. Republication efforts by Taschen GmbH, by an organization called Bibliotheque Image, and by the Institut d'Orient produced new editions in 1988 and again in 1990.

• 5. Conquest Through Scholarship

  ›

  Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism called the Description an "enormous" work and characterized it as "that great collective appropriation of one country by another." The source makes the underlying purpose explicit: the work was created as propaganda to establish the French as good caretakers of a neglected land and to assess how the French Empire could profit from their new territory.

  The maps of the Carte de l'Egypte were written in the Latin alphabet rather than the Arabic alphabet. Dr. Anne Godlewska, in her article "Map, Text and Image. The Mentality of Enlightened Conquerors," describes this as a deliberate choice, one aimed at transforming what she calls "a chaos of Arabic names" into European order.

  The information gathered for the Description went on to shape French policy proposals for Egypt, which were then adopted by Egyptian leaders for administration in the mid-19th century. The Carte de l'Egypte was used in the planning of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez and in the design of other major Egyptian canals in the decades that followed.

  The precedent the Description set extended beyond Egypt. By portraying France as a historically-minded caretaker documenting and preserving a land's wealth, the work helped establish a template that later European powers applied to their own colonial ventures.

• 6. Legacy and Near Loss

  ›

  Description de l'Egypte has been credited with founding the field of Egyptology, though at least one historian has argued that this claim overstates the work's uniqueness. What is broadly accepted is that the Description contributed to the modern foundations of zoology, geography, topography, and several branches of hydrology.

  On the 17th of December 2011, during clashes between protesters and the military in Cairo, a fire broke out at the Institut d'Egypte, the Egyptian Scientific Institute. Reports circulated that the original manuscript of the Description had been destroyed. Those reports were wrong. The burnt building had contained a set of the 23-volume first print edition, and that set was saved without irreparable damage. Egypt's minister of culture confirmed that at least two more complete sets of the first edition remained in the country. The original manuscript material itself, the notes, drawings, and documents that preceded the printed volumes, resides in Paris, held by France's National Archives and National Library.

  The Georgetown University Library mounted an exhibition of the Description in November 2000, running through January 2001, and it drew from a copy of a first edition that had once belonged to Bernardino Drovetti, the French consul general in Egypt.