Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt

By Nina Burleigh


More than two centuries ago, in continuing efforts to expand the French empire into Asia and Africa, Napoleon set out to conquer Egypt. He led upward of 50,000 sailors and soldiers across the Mediterranean into the desert.

In "Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt," Nina Burleigh looks at the corps of 150 Parisian artists and scientists, naturalists and physicists who also traveled with the troops, men young and old who heeded the general's call for scholars to help explore new, foreign territories.

As a military incursion, the campaign was less than successful. As an intellectual endeavor, however, it would ultimately yield, among other things, an exhaustive encyclopedia about the country, "twenty-three outsize volumes," Burleigh writes in the introduction, "delicately printed with engravings of the buildings, rocks, people, plants, and thousands of the beasts, birds, bugs, and fish that dwelled in Egypt circa 1800."

Burleigh, author of "A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer" and "The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams and the Making of America's Greatest Museum: The Smithsonian," explains significant details without getting heavily academic. By separating the narrative into sections and sketching individuals - the chemist, the mathematician, the zoologist - she makes the discussion accessible.

The chapter "The Inventor," for example, looks at Frenchman Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who created "useful things and imagined other machines and devices that he himself couldn't fabricate."

Conté grew up in Saint-Cénary, a village in the Savoie region. At 9, he skillfully carved a working violin. At 12, he painted ceiling panels of saints for his town church. In Paris during his 20s, he apprenticed with a professional artist and toiled in the evenings at a chemistry laboratory. Before long, he developed an instrument to help cast commemorative medals for the French government and founded the country's first school of industrial and applied arts.

In Egypt, Conté worked diligently. Called by colleagues, such as chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, "the column of the expedition and the soul of the colony," he eventually set up and supervised a small village of shops that manufactured everything from gunpowder to cloth for military uniforms.

"Using only indigenous materials," Burleigh writes, "he created all sorts of machines, including a printing press, a coin press, geometry machines, engineering tools, and even trumpets for the army. He built a smelting foundry to make steel and then produced sabers."

On the other hand, the chapter "The Engineers" focuses on the engineers and surveyors in the group, many of whom Berthollet recruited personally for the sojourn. Some came from well-to-do families; others did not. Some were bookish and dutiful; others were independent and occasionally unruly.

Engineer Pierre-Francois Xavier Bouchard, digging along a wall in Rosetta one hot summer day in 1799, trying to reinforce a fort on the west bank of the Nile, unearthed a granite stone etched with multiple scripts.

He reported the discovery to Jacques Menou, the supervising officer, who in turn "took it into his own tent, had it cleaned, and arranged for the Greek to be translated." The tablet, they believed, would help scholars eventually unlock the mysteries of ancient Egyptian writing, providing insight into hieroglyphics.

Unfortunately for the French, the Rosetta Stone had to be conceded a couple of years later to the British as part of a surrender agreement. Today, the artifact sits not in the Louvre in Paris, but in the British Museum in London, with no true indication, Burleigh notes, of its provenance.

That scores of scientists joined Napoleon's expedition voluntarily, leaving behind friends and families for lands unknown, was a testament perhaps to their faith in the general and their innate curiosity. That many of them died in Egypt proved just how precarious the situation became. (The French civilian toll would top 25; the military toll would top 25,000.) Those who returned home years later, who survived the sea voyage, the desert heat, the war and the pestilence, needed to make sense of all they had experienced and what they had collected and cataloged abroad. For decades afterward, they generated volumes of literature.

Published serially between 1809 and 1828, "The Description of Egypt" turned out to be "the most comprehensive view of the culture and architecture of ancient and modern Egypt ever seen," Burleigh writes. "Never before, and possibly never since, at least in the predigital age, had so much information from so many sources and in so many forms (text, drawings, maps) been compiled into one work."

It served as a foundation for future archaeological study and further fueled public interest in Egypt, consequences the author recognizes throughout her narrative, a fascinating read about an extraordinary time and place in world history.