Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt

322 Pages·2007·3.37 MB·English

by  Nina Burleigh

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MIRAG
Napoleon’s Scientists and
the Unveiling of Egypt
NINA BURLEIGH

E
CONT NTS e e e e e e e

Introduction v
1 The General 1
2 The Geometer and the Chemist 19
3 The Inventor 41
4 The Institute 59
5 The Engineers 89
6 The Doctors 115
7 The Mathematician 139
Photographic Insert
8 The Artist 167
9 The Naturalist 185
10 The Zoologist 195
11 The Stone 209
12 The Book 219
Epilogue: From Egyptomania to Egyptology 241
Notes 249
Bibliography 261
Index 271
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Nina Burleigh
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
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INT ODUCTION e e e e e

Alittle more than two hundred years ago, Europeans
contemplated the Islamic countries of the Middle East
from afar and imagined rare silks and spices, harems, and gold—yellow
gold, not the underground sea of black gold that modern Westerners
associate with the region. The territory was largely unmapped, its his-
tory and people almost as obscure as the dark side of the moon. Only
the most reckless or mad European had dared traverse the lands of the
Prophet in the years between the Crusades and the end of the eigh-
teenth century. The gory conflict between Christianity and Islam still
loomed large in the collective memory. Tales of impalements, behead-
ings, and other atrocities in Islamic Central Europe over a three-hun-
dred-year period, culminating with the Battle of Vienna in the late
seventeenth century, were vivid deterrents to the few intrepid souls—
merchants and writers, mostly—who would consider the journey. The
inhabitants of the Middle East were assumed to be inhospitable, and
the climate was known to be extreme. The voyage from Europe to the
Orient, as it was then called, was arduous and long, thirty days at least
by sea, often more.
That never stopped people from fantasizing about what lay beyond
the water. On the contrary, it only increased the fascination. Egypt,
and its extinct ancient culture, just across the Mediterranean Sea, had
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Introduction
tantalized Europeans for centuries. They knew colossal relics of the
oldest-known human civilization were concentrated along the Nile in
crumbling piles between two vast, usurping deserts, amidst a modern
population that professed faith in Islam. Europeans attached all sorts of
inferences to this place, viewing it variously as the primal seat of natu-
ral law, the remains of a golden age of civilization, and a repository of
lost magical knowledge. Few ever got close enough to really know.
By the end of the eighteenth century, such questions as what these
monuments were and who made them had hung over the Nile valley
since biblical times. The Egyptians themselves could not explain them.
The hieroglyphic script—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 mem-
ories settled on the ancient sites, along with layers of sand drifting in
from the two deserts.
The French did not invade Egypt in 1798, however, to solve his-
torical mysteries. They sought colonial power and commerce, at the
dawn of the modern global economy. When Napoleon led 34,000 sol-
diers and 16,000 sailors across the Mediterranean to the distant desert
country, the young general undertook a bold (many said crazy) thrust
in the ongoing competition among European countries for influence in
distant parts of the globe.
France and England had been vying for economic control of terri-
tory, from India to North America to the South Seas, since the 1600s.
The benefits of such control were well understood. A new class of fan-
tastically wealthy men were building mansions in England and on the
Continent, living like blood nobility off the bounty of colonial com-
merce. England had lost its American colonies to the Americans, but
it still controlled most of India, regarded by Europeans as the greatest
possible Asian possession.
vi
Introduction
Between 1774 and 1798, the French government had entertained
at least a dozen proposals from various diplomats, politicians, and
businessmen to invade Egypt. “Egypt,” as one French diplomat coun-
seled the ill-fated King Louis XVI, “does not belong to anybody.” But
the time to claim it had never seemed ripe, until the right man came
along.
Napoleon’s gambit was brazen and ill-timed. The French had just
recovered from their Revolution. Their economy was in tatters, civic
life barely restored. The streets of Paris ran with sewage, and the city
smelled worse than it had during the Middle Ages. The newly anti-
monarchist country that had killed its king had been fighting wars with
royalist nations for several years. Diverting soldiers and matériel to
Egypt in 1798, while European foes still menaced their borders, was
hardly a conventional allocation of resources by the leaders of France.
They were for it, though, because they longed to realize their share of
the benefits of empire.
Napoleon and the French government hoped that taking Egypt
would be the first step toward founding a grand French empire that
would encompass generous swathes of Africa and Asia. The French
had made colonial incursions into Asia, but since the British repulsed
them at Bengal in 1757, French influence in India had waned to almost
nothing, and French leaders still salivated for a piece of the Asian pie.
Egypt, with its Mediterranean coast and distant Turkish government-
by-proxy in the form of the Mameluke dynasties, had been a tempting
objective for decades.
When the French arrived, the Mamelukes had ruled Egypt for
more than five hundred years. In Arabic, the word mamluk means “the
possessed.” The Mamelukes were a bizarre slave caste that had been
Islam’s elite fighting force for nearly a thousand years. They were
white Eurasian men kidnapped or purchased as children and then sold
at markets in Damascus, Istanbul, and Cairo expressly to be trained in
equestrian fighting and rigorous Islam, in order to defend their masters.
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Introduction
In the ninth century this warrior slave caste—androcentric, ascetic,
and Orthodox Muslim—overwhelmed their masters in Baghdad. From
then on, although Mamelukes replenished their ranks with white boys
purchased from slavers, they were slaves in name only.
The Egyptian campaign had many eccentric, even unbelievable,
aspects, starting with the Mamelukes themselves, and including the
fact that the 50,000 French soldiers and sailors mustered for the inva-
sion weren’t told where they were going until their ships were almost
within sight of the target. The corps of 151 Parisian artists and sci-
entists organized to accompany the soldiers was another surreal facet
of the adventure. Responding to the young general’s call for savants
to help explore a secret destination, a group of Paris’s brightest intel-
lectual lights left the safety of their labs, studios, and classrooms and
boarded ships. Astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists,
doctors, chemists, engineers, botanists, and artists—even a poet and
a musicologist—locked up their desks, packed their books, said good-
bye to friends and family, and undertook what was, literally, for most of
them, a voyage into the unknown.
Bringing scientists along gave credence to the ideal of this mission
civilisatrice. Claiming to bring French-style culture and democracy to
Arabs ruled by non-Arab tyrants offered moral cover for the invasion.
Napoleon also had a classical precedent for bringing scientists on a
military campaign. His spiritual role model, Alexander the Great, had
traveled with philosophers when he invaded Persia. Having a human
encyclopedia at his side added a certain elegance to the brutal endeav-
or. Besides accomplishing the Enlightenment goals of categorizing and
classifying, Napoleon also expected his savants to help administer the
conquered territory, mapping the land, finding the water, befriending
the leaders, and even negotiating with the foe. Some of the civilians
did indeed become integral to the military occupation, in terms of sup-
port and administration.
The scientists, however, believed they were along primarily to
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