Book Review On 'Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists And The Unveiling of Egypt'

Iraq certainly wasn't the first war where the invaders sought moral cover to justify their actions, but you have to go far to top Napoleon's claim that he was going into Egypt as a mission civilsatrice in order to bring French-style culture and democracy to all those unwashed Arabs.

But as Nina Burleigh writes in Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Bonaparte might have been crazy for starting the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place (sounds familiar, doesn't it?), but taking along a corps of 151 scientists and artists to help give his 50,000 soldiers and sailors that moral cover had a classical precedent.

That was Napoleon's spiritual role model, Alexander the Great, who had philosophers at his side when he invaded Persia in the 4th century B.C. to give him, well, all kinds of advice.

Although France had barely recovered from the Revolution and its economy was in tatters, on July 1, 1798 an invasion force under Napoleon's personal command disembarked near Alexandria in the service of attaining two goals that had nothing to do with bringing pommes frites to the Egpytian people.

These were tapping into Egypt's huge commercial and agricultural potential and its strategic importance in the red-hot Anglo-French rivalry. This had tipped to the advantage of the English who were solidifying their hold on India, which was the biggest remaining colonial prize after a bunch of drunken American framers . . . er, farmers, had defeated the British crown.

The French forces took Alexandria in a nonce, routed the Mamluk army at Shubra Khit and Imbabah, and entered Cairo in barely three weeks.

Mamluk rule in Egypt collapsed, but Napoleon's strategic position was far from strong because he controlled only the Delta and Cairo and Upper Egypt remained the preserve of the Mamluks and Bedouins.

Then things went from precarious to worse.

On August 1, the British fleet under Lord Nelson annihilated the French fleet as it lay at anchor at Abu Qir in one of the great routs in naval history, isolating Napoleon's forces, and on September 11 Sultan Selim III declared war on France.

On October 21, the residents of Cairo rioted against the French after they desecrated a mosque and shat on a Koran in one of a number of unfortunate parallels to today's Mess in Mesopotamia, chief among them that like the Americans in 2003, the French were greeted not as liberators but as occupiers and also were not home by Christmas.

Napoleon was forced to invade Syria in May 1799 to forestall an Ottoman invasion, and when that failed, he and a small company of troops tucked their tails between their legs and secretly left Egypt for France in August 1799, leaving General Jean-Baptiste Kléber as the unwilling commander of a dispirited army with no supply line, no francs and Alpine wool uniforms but no canteens in the stifling desert environment.

Kléber tried to secure the evacuation of his troops to France, but England forced him to fight. Kléber was subsequently assassinated and his command was taken over by General Abdullah Jacques Menou, a French convert to Islam, who capitulated to an Anglo-Ottoman invasion force on June 18, 1801, mercifully ending the botched occupation.

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But what of those 150 scientists and artists?

As Burleigh explains in Mirage, their average age was 25 and only a mere handful had a clue about what awaited them in Egypt other than the yet to be discredited theory that:

"The hieroglyphic scripts -- carved into every inch of space on colossal walls and columns -- was believed even by scholars to be comprised not of phonetic symbols but magical formulas capable of reviving the dead or turning lead into gold. European doctors thought ground-up mummies were medicinal. Ignorance, bad scholarship, and faulty memories settled on the ancient sites, along with layers of sand drifting in from the two deserts."

Among the scientists were two already famous old hands, Claude-Louis Berthollet, who was one of the founders of modern chemistry and the organizer of the scientific corps, and Gaspard Monge, who invented the branch of geometry that allows the representation of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions.

Both men had ample experience at organizing and transporting "military collections," the quaint phrase for looted antiquities. The most famous antiquity found during the expedition was the Rosetta stone, which ended up in the British Museum and not the Louvre after the soldiers in whose care it was left bargained it away.

Burleigh focuses on Berthollet and Monge and eight other scientist-explorers in the 10 chapters that make up this nicely written but short book (a mere 239 pages of text).

Despite being literally stranded in Egypt after Napoleon's fleet was decimated, the intellectual excitement among corps members help compensate for the hardships and a native people whom they found to be confounding and deeply inscrutable.

Writes Burleigh of the meetings at the Institute of Egypt, the name given to a sprawling Mamluk estate that the corps commandeered:

"Science then was far less specialized than it is today, and highly compartmentalized fields of study did not yet exist. Back in Paris, though, there were boundaries between general fields; chemists were not expected to theorize about zoology, botanists were not conversant in mathematical theory, for example. . . . In Cairo, the boundaries between fields blurred, and Parisian rigor diminished. In the Institute gardens, architects debated with naturalists about animals and ancient structures, physicians and astronomers debated with the geographers about the meaning of the hieroglyphic script, the age of the ancient culture. These conversations among learned men manifested the highest ideals of the Enlightenment. Especially for the younger participants, the effect was of embarking on a thrilling intellectual exercise without borders."

The discovery of the Rosetta Stone in July 1799 was an accidental byproduct of Napoleon's determination to map and excavate the ancient canals that had connected the Nile and Red Sea.

His goal, of course, was to build a canal across the 100-mile isthmus between the Mediterranean and Red Sea, something that the Persians had stopped short of doing in the 7th century because they believed that the Red was 30 feet higher and Egypt would be inundated with salt water. Napoleon's surveyors erroneously reinforced that view and construction on the Suez Canal was not to begin until 60 years later.

The accidental excavators of the Rosetta Stone understood that they had stumbled on something significant when they unearthed the pink granite stone with carved writing in three scripts, one obviously Greek and one hieroglyphic. (The third was Egyptian demotic.) They just didn't know what.

Finding the stone was a heady moment for the French scholars, but none more so than Nicolas-Jacques Conté, a painter, balloonist and inveterate inventor of, among other things, the modern pencil. Conté used the stone as if it were an engraved plate and made prints with the hieroglyphs in black on a white background, turning what is probably the most famous stone in the world black.

It had been 1,500 years since any living human could read the hieroglyphics, and the comparative translation of the stone -- a decree from Ptolemy V describing the repealing of various taxes and instructions to erect statues in temples -- assisted greatly in understanding many previously undecipherable examples of hieroglyphic writing.

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Over the next 26 years, the survivors of the expedition compiled the seminal Description de l’Égypte, a 24-volume encyclopedia published for wealthy subscribers that encompassed the natural, political and social history of Egypt.

The lasting legacy of Napoleon's misadventure was the Egyptomania that swept Europe and the U.S., resulting in the plunder that brought the Luxor obelisk to the Place de la Concorde in Paris and Cleopatra's Needle to New York. Egypt insists that the Rosetta Stone and these other great pieces of its ancient history be returned, but as Napoleon might say, pas question!