By Nina Burleigh
Little greater than 2 hundred years in the past, basically the main reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared traverse the unmapped territory of the modern day heart East. Its historical past and peoples have been the topic of a lot delusion and speculation—and no area aroused larger curiosity than Egypt, the place stories of mysterious monuments, inscrutable hieroglyphics, infrequent silks and spices, and rumors of misplaced magical wisdom tantalized dreamers and taunted the power-hungry.
It was once now not till 1798, whilst an not likely band of clinical explorers traveled from Paris to the Nile Valley, that Westerners obtained their first actual glimpse of what lay past the Mediterranean Sea.
below the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French military, a small and little-known corps of Paris's brightest highbrow lighting left the protection in their laboratories, studios, and study rooms to embark on a thirty-day crossing into the unknown—some by no means to work out French seashores back. Over a hundred and fifty astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists, medical professionals, chemists, engineers, botanists, artists—even a poet and a musicologist—accompanied Napoleon's troops into Egypt. sporting pencils rather than swords, specimen jars rather than box weapons, those hugely complete males participated within the first large-scale interplay among Europeans and Muslims of the fashionable period. and plenty of lived to inform the story.
Hazarding starvation, trouble, uncertainty, and disorder, Napoleon's scientists risked their lives in pursuit of discovery. They approached the land no longer as colonizers, yet as specialists of their fields of scholarship, meticulously categorizing and amassing their finds—from the ruins of the vast pyramids to the smallest bugs to the mythical Rosetta Stone.
those that survived the three-year day trip compiled an exhaustive encyclopedia of Egypt, twenty-three volumes in size, which secured their position in historical past because the world's earliest-known archaeologists. Unraveling the mysteries that had befuddled Europeans for hundreds of years, Napoleon's scientists have been the 1st to rfile the striking accomplishments of a misplaced civilization—before the darkish shadow of empire-building took Africa and the center East by means of hurricane.
across the world acclaimed journalist Nina Burleigh brings readers again to a little-known landmark event on the sunrise of the fashionable era—one that finally printed the inner most secrets and techniques of historical Egypt to a truly curious continent.
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Additional info for Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt
Example text
Savary’s garden of sensual delights included naked bathing beauties on the banks of the Nile. 16 The General Napoleon had also read and met with another travel-writer, the ponderously named Constantin-François de Chassebouef de Volney. Volney was more critical, although his dour text was fantastically illustrated by the traveling artist Louis-François Cassas, who depicted an Oriental nirvana of reconstructed ruins and sylphs bathed in shadows of obelisk and palm. Volney had visited Egypt in the 1780s, and he disabused his French audience of their silk and spice fantasies.
On their first full day in Alexandria, Monge and Geoffroy SaintHilaire examined the two obelisks near the pillar (one of them, now known as Cleopatra’s Needle, resides in New York’s Central Park; the other stands on the Thames Embankment in London). Denon and Dolomieu discovered a huge, hieroglyph-covered sarcophagus inside a mosque that had previously been a Coptic church. The French— and later the British—suspected that the sarcophagus once held the remains of Alexander himself. In fact, it had housed the bones of an Egyptian king named Nectanebo II.
Greeks and Romans ruled it for centuries, followed by six hundred years of Arab control, then Mameluke control, and, finally, nominal Ottoman rule. The Mamelukes built the fort at Alexandria to repel a sea attack on Egypt by the Ottoman Turks. A white, curving labyrinth of stone tunnels and hallways, Qaitbey’s walls were fifty feet high and pierced with gunholes. From this fastness, Napoleon scanned the sea. He wasn’t worried about whatever was massing behind him in Egypt’s interior; his infantry could handle equestrian warriors.