by Brian Fagan
On July 19, 1799, a letter from the surgeon Michel-Ange Lancret announced that “citizen Bouchard, officer of engineers, had discovered in the town of Rosetta some inscriptions which may offer much interest.”6 The assembled savants realized at once that the Rosetta stone might provide the key to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. There were three versions of a decree, one in formal hieroglyphs; the second in demotic, the freehand version of Egyptian script; and the third in Greek. The inscription itself dated to March 27, 196 BC. The text, promulgated on stone throughout the land by the Egyptian priesthood, honored the anniversary of pharaoh Ptolemy V’s succession to the throne. Explicit instructions came from the stone itself: “They shall write the decree on a stela of hard stone in the script of the words of god [formal hieroglyphs], the script of documents [demotic] and the script of the Ionians [Greek] and set it up in the first-rank temples, the second-rank temples and the third-rank temples, in the vicinity of the divine image of the pharaoh living forever.”7
The Rosetta stone was the most important item in the savants’ collections, but there was much more. While Napoléon attempted a draconian overhaul of Egypt’s administration, small groups of savants traversed the length and breadth of the country, as far upstream as the First Cataract. They traveled with the army, roughing it under the stars, sometimes fighting alongside the infantry, enduring harsh treks across savage desert terrain. Each of them became field-workers as well as scholars, and served as soldiers and administrators, and, above all, as inventors and archaeologists. They developed new kinds of water pumps, edited a journal for the troops published every ten days, presided over courts, and made pencils from melted-down lead bullets. The 167 scientists were the Enlightenment in action, as interested in traditional medicine and the diversity of the Egyptian population as they were in fish and mammals.
Few scientific expeditions have ever left such a legacy, especially in Egyptology and geography. The cartographers on the commission’s staff produced the first detailed map of Egypt, which was of no use to Napoléon, as it was published long after his eclipse. Its artists contributed a stunning visual impression of a hitherto little-known country, especially the omnipresent Denon. When General Desaix de Veygoux marched up the Nile from Cairo in pursuit of Murat Bey in August 1798, Denon, by now a hardened and indefatigable traveler who was able to discover and record with uncanny accuracy the glories of ancient Egyptian architecture and sculpture, joined him.
Denon had spent his early months in Egypt sketching and observing the local scene, attending meetings of the institute, and busily recording his impressions. He was rapturous about the pyramids: “The great distance from which they can be perceived makes them appear diaphanous, tinted with the bluish tone of the sky, and restores to them the perfection and purity of the angles which the centuries have marred.” His expectations for the perilous journey with Desaix de Veygoux were boundless, for, as he wrote later: “I was about to tread the soil of a land covered since immemorial times with a veil of mystery from Herodotus to our own times, all the travelers were content to sail up the Nile rapidly, not daring to lose sight of their boats, and leaving them only in order to inspect, hastily and uneasily, the objects closest to shore.”8 The right man had arrived in the Nile Valley at the right moment.
Denon’s precise, and perhaps rather stiff, record of the major monuments of the Nile was a remarkable tour de force carried out under incredibly difficult conditions. Desaix de Veygoux’s army made forced marches of 40 to 50 kilometers (25 to 30 miles) a day, constantly in danger of raids from marauding warriors. At Hermopolis, the ancient Khemenu, the “Eight Towns,” a cult center of the scribe god, Thoth, Denon was given but a few minutes to make a sketch of a New Kingdom temple erected by Seti I and Rameses II in the thirteenth century BC. At Dendera, cult center of the cow goddess, Hathor, south of Abydos, he was more fortunate. The army lingered in admiration at the magnificent temple of Hathor for a day. Denon was enraptured: “Pencil in hand, I passed from object to object, drawn away from one thing by the interest of another. I felt ashamed of the inadequacy of the drawings I made of such sublime things.”9 The sun set. Denon remained oblivious, wrapped in artistic rapture, until his commanding officer, General Belliard, himself escorted him home to the distant army at a gallop.
FIGURE 4.2 The interior of the temple of Hathor at Dendera. A characteristically evocative reconstruction from Description de l’Égypte.
Then, on January 27, 1799, the army rounded a bend of the Nile and came in sight of the temples of Amun at Luxor and Karnak. The regiments came to a spontaneous halt and burst into applause. “Without an order being given, the men formed their ranks and presented arms, to the accompaniment of the drums and the bands,” wrote a lieutenant on the expedition.10 Denon was already sketching, conscious of a great and emotional moment when an entire army paid a spontaneous tribute to antiquity. Wherever the army went, Denon went too, riding furiously in search of monuments and sketching under fire or even when in danger of capture. Denon eventually reached Aswan, where he visited the islands of Elephantine and Philae.
Denon’s work aroused tremendous enthusiasm for archaeology, especially among the hydraulic engineers charged with improving Egyptian agriculture. The engineers were soon neglecting their own dull work and making a beeline for temples and tombs, recording architectural features, hieroglyphic inscriptions, and all the magnificent panoply of ancient Egypt. Pencils ran out, lead bullets were frantically melted down as substitutes, and a vast body of irreplaceable information was recorded for posterity. At the same time, they removed small antiquities by the hundreds from temple and tomb.
FIGURE 4.3 French savants sail past the Island of Philae. From Description de l’Égypte.
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Napoléon’s expedition to Egypt was doomed to military failure from the beginning, largely because of the vulnerability of its seaborne communications. At first, all was success. He captured Alexandria, advanced on Cairo, and defeated the Mamluks at the Battle of the Pyramids, which was actually fought some kilometers away. But disaster stalked downstream. While he occupied Cairo, Admiral Horatio Nelson and his fleet descended on the French armada anchored in Abukir Bay west of Alexandria. On August 1, 1798, Nelson pounced on the trapped transports and warships. By the end of the day, Napoléon was cut off from his supply lines and his army marooned in the Nile Valley. Many of the savants’ as yet unloaded books and instruments went to the bottom.
The campaign staggered on for another year. An expeditionary force under General Desaix de Veygoux overran Upper Egypt, his soldiers plagued by misery, hunger, Egyptian eye disease, and many other misfortunes. Finally, on August 19, 1799, Napoléon abandoned his army and fled from Egypt on a fast ship. The army surrendered to British forces in 1801, and the abortive expedition was over. The resulting Treaty of Alexandria guaranteed safe passage for the scientists back to France. By that time, the savants had assembled in Alexandria, where the British inspected their baggage. The French commander, General Abdallas Jacques-François de Menou, surrendered the city to General Hutchinson of the British army. He was one of those persons who cannot conclude an agreement of any sort without recrimination and debate. No sooner had the military agreement been signed than Menou and Hutchinson began to dicker over the savants and their collections. The British claimed all the antiquities under a clause of the capitulation agreement. Menou stated that the Rosetta stone, the prize of the whole collection, was his personal property. But the scientists, led by the zoologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, declared that they would rather follow their collections to England than give them up. Menou was obliged to grant their request and did so with ill grace: “I have just been informed that several among our collectors wish to follow their seeds, minerals, birds, butterflies or reptiles wherever you choose to ship their crates,” he wrote pettishly. “I do not know if they wish to have themselves stuffed for the purpose, but I can assure you that if the idea should appeal to them, I shall not prevent them.”11
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p; The scientists then threatened to burn their specimens if there was a chance they would lose them. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was explicit in his discussions with British diplomat Sir William Hamilton:
Without us this material is a dead language that neither you nor your scientists can understand. Sooner than permit this iniquitous and vandalous spoliation we will destroy our property, we will scatter it amid the Libyan sands or throw it into the sea. We shall burn our riches ourselves. It is celebrity you are aiming for. Very well, you can count on the long memory of history: You also will have burnt a library in Alexandria.
Fortunately, General Hutchinson was a man of some vision and imagination, sufficiently impressed by the savants’ eloquence to allow the scientists to keep their collections. But he insisted on retaining the Rosetta stone and some large specimens, including two obelisks and two sarcophagi, as well as a large statue of Rameses II. Menou yielded the stone reluctantly. Even then, the scientists tried to hide the Rosetta stone on a boat, but William Hamilton discovered it and recovered the stela with a military escort. In a concession to science, the French were allowed to keep imprints they had made of the inscriptions before relinquishing the precious artifact.
Everyone already knew that the Rosetta stone was a find of preeminent importance. By order of King George III, it was housed in the British Museum in London. To this day, the Rosetta stone graces the Egyptian galleries of the museum. Only once has it left its adopted home—for a temporary exhibition in the Louvre in 1973. It has never been exhibited in Egypt.
Back in Europe, news of the Scientific and Artistic Commission’s work spread rapidly. Denon returned to Paris to an enthusiastic reception. He was made the first director of the Louvre and founded the Egyptian collections of that great institution, continuing to collect works of art for the French national collections throughout the remainder of Napoléon’s political career. His Voyages dans la basse et la haute Égypte was published in 1801 and soon became a best-seller translated into several languages. The Voyages revealed an exotic land virtually unknown in scientific circles. Denon’s artistry added spice and color to his adventures, which lost nothing in the telling.
There was far more to come. Napoléon’s expedition was an abject military failure, but it was a scientific triumph whose legacy resonates through Egyptology. The 167 savants left a remarkable epitaph behind them, a monument of interdisciplinary research that was the first of its kind. For years, the survivors of the expedition labored on a masterpiece, the twenty-volume Description de l’Égypte. The Description is a monster work by any standard. Eighteen years in the making, the first volume of twenty appeared in 1809, published “by the orders of His Majesty the Emperor Napoléon the Great.” The last volume came out in 1828, largely because of the devotion of the engineer and geographer Edmé Jomard, who lived long enough to see the revival of the Institut de l’Égypte in 1859.12 A second edition appeared between 1820 and 1830.
The sumptuous and magnificently illustrated folios of the Description caused a sensation in European cultural and scholarly circles. They depicted the riches of ancient Egypt with a vivid accuracy that had never been witnessed before. The delicate lines and colors of paintings and inscriptions were brilliantly executed on a large-scale format that made every minor detail spring to the entranced eye. Artifacts, hieroglyphs, temples, and the landscape of Egypt literally spring from the page. It is difficult for us living in a world of instant communication and of easy familiarity with the pyramids and the ancient Egyptians to understand the tremendous impact of the Description. The savants revealed a marvelous, flourishing early civilization whose monuments had stood the test of thousands of years of wars and neglect. Temple after temple, pyramid after pyramid, artifact after artifact—Denon and his colleagues laid out before a delighted public a romantic and exciting world of exotic and fascinating antiquity. As many researchers have pointed out, before Napoléon’s expedition the monuments of Egypt were quite well known in European antiquarian and scientific circles, where the impact of the Description was less marked. The work of the commission added flames to an already general enthusiasm for things Egyptian, reflected, among other things, in the sets for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.
From the museum point of view, the finds of the French expedition were of extraordinary value and rarity. The British Museum, for example, contained but a handful of Egyptian antiquities in 1800, most of them mummies, scarabs, and small ornaments. Now the savants had acquired an enormous new collection of Egyptian antiquities, many of them of great beauty. The new artifacts transformed appreciation of pharaonic art, which was totally different from the familiar classical traditions.
The knowledge obtained from the commission’s work was even more significant than its collections. Although the savants did not discover any new sites or spectacular temples, the work of the French was apparently so accurate and was published so beautifully that the general public was able to appreciate the extraordinary range and quality of the antiquities of the Nile. The French expedition and its publications provided a catalyst for further study of ancient Egypt and the decipherment of hieroglyphs when it was later realized that many of the savants’ copies were inaccurate.
The Description also fueled a frenzied scramble for Egyptian antiquities, triggered, also, by popular enthusiasm for the exotic and by an increasing familiarity with Egypt among soldiers and diplomats.
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The British chose to leave Egypt to the Turks rather than annex it in the name of George III. A desultory occupation by the British army under the earl of Cavan lasted a year, enough time to hand the reins of government back to the emissaries of the Turkish Empire. The sultan himself had little interest in Egypt, provided his annual taxes were paid on time. Powerful landlords who harshly exploited the poor for ever higher taxes dominated the Nile Valley. Egypt was desperately in need of leadership and strong government.
The hour produced the man, a ruler who had a catastrophic effect on the archaeology of ancient Egypt. Muhammad Ali was an Albanian orphan and mercenary who rose to powerful commands in the Turkish army in Egypt through sheer ability. In 1805 he took the government of Egypt into his own hands, was named pasha, and, after years of civil war, broke the power of the Mamluks and became for all intents and purposes the independent ruler of the Nile Valley. This capable and ruthless man governed the affairs of Egypt from 1805 to 1849. A well-built and intelligent-looking ruler, Ali provided Egypt with a firmer government than it had enjoyed in centuries, although his rule was far from benevolent toward his humble subjects, who suffered under high taxes and harsh corvée-labor drafts. His thirst for power and international influence was tempered with a desire to bring Western technology to the Nile, to harness the river for agriculture, and to introduce industrial manufacturing to Egypt. Competent foreigners with new ideas were welcomed in Cairo. Many of them were put to work developing factories, encouraging industry, and designing irrigation schemes. Unfortunately, many of Ali’s most ambitious schemes foundered in a sea of bureaucratic inefficiency and the innate conservatism of the peasants and his ministers.
Muhammad Ali was friendly toward foreigners and did a great deal to open up the Nile Valley not only to merchants and diplomats but also to the casual tourist and antiquities dealer. What matter if many of the visitors were interested in antiquities and ransacking ancient tombs? To a despotic ruler interested in international power and foreign capital, the monuments of ancient Egypt were of little interest except as a diplomatic lever or a way of keeping powerful visitors with strange hobbies interested in Egypt.
Soon, a steady stream of collectors, dealers, diplomats, tourists, and just plain shady characters descended on Egypt to strip the country of artifacts large and small. Some of them just wanted exotic objects for their own collections. Most saw a chance for a quick profit from the antiquities trade.
The British occupation force started the scramble. The earl of Cavan took a fancy to one of the obelisks of Alexandria and obtained a permit fr
om the Turkish authorities to remove it to London as a memorial to the British victories in Egypt. The soldiers themselves were enthusiastic about the scheme, subscribed money for a ship, and volunteered their labor to transport the obelisk. London was unenthusiastic, so the obelisk remained in the squalor of Alexandria until 1877, when it was finally transported to London on the initiative of Erasmus Wilson, a wealthy businessman. The seventy-year delay was entirely due to British government disinterest, despite renewed invitations from both Muhammad Ali and his successor, the khedive Ismail. Only when a Greek landowner threatened to cut up the obelisk for building stone did private initiative save from destruction what is now known as Cleopatra’s Needle. The Needle resides incongruously on the London Embankment overlooking the River Thames.
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Then came the diplomats. Britain and France, as well as other powers, maintained a diplomatic presence in Cairo and Alexandria during the early nineteenth century. In the early years of Muhammad Ali’s rule, the political functions of the consuls were minimal. Diplomats had a great deal of spare time for travel and to fossick in ancient Egyptian ruins.
Bernardino Michele Maria Drovetti (1776–1852), a Piedmontese, was the first French consul general. An ambitious, driven man of magnificently villainous appearance, complete with a curled mustache, Drovetti enjoyed a distinguished military career, acquired French citizenship, and reached the rank of major in Napoléon’s Piedmontese regiments, finally giving sterling service as a military judge. In 1802, he was appointed deputy commissioner of commercial relations at the French consulate in Alexandria. He remained at the consulate until 1815, acquiring a reputation as a superlative diplomat, high in Muhammad Ali’s favor. He played a major role in stabilizing the pasha’s regime. We do not know when Drovetti first became interested in antiquities, but he organized the unwrapping of a mummy in 1812 for some French and English guests, among them that remarkable traveler Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope. “A French surgeon performed the dissecting part, which consisted in dividing a vast number of folds of fine linen or cotton, which bandaged the body tight from head to foot. When these were removed, the right hand was found to hold a papyrus. The features were not in good preservation.”13