NAPOLEON IN EGYPTDespite France’s bellicose expansion, her neighbour to the north was not
invaded. An invasion of the British Isles was considered, but, realizing how ill-
prepared the French army was for such an enterprise, Napoleon convinced his
superiors to attack them on a diVerent front. As a means of interfering with
Britain’s access to India, he proposed an invasion of Egypt (JasanoV2005: ch.
4). Upon approval of the plans, Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798. 3 The
Egyptian campaign eventually ended with French defeat in 1801. The French
presence in Egypt, however, was the start of what Edward Said deWned as
Orientalism (Said 1978: 76), the revelation of the East by the Western experts
as the ‘Other’ in comparison to their own world, as static and despotic in
opposition to the dynamism and democracy of the Western world. This
‘Other’, however, mainly referred to modern Egypt, the contemporary situ-
ation of the country as opposed to the Pharaonic period. Egypt’s ancient past
was not completely unknown to Westerners at the end of the eighteenth
century. In contrast to other civilizations, such as those of the Near East
and India, about which very little was known, the Egypt of the Pharaohs had
not been forgotten during the early modern period. From the sixteenth
century onwards the rediscovery and restoration in Rome of the many
obelisksWrst brought there by the Roman Emperors in theWrst centuryce
helped to keep the memory of Egypt alive (Habachi 1977; Iversen 1968–72).
From the seventeenth century explorers such as the Italian Pietro della Valle
(1586–1652), the Danish Carsten Niebuhr (1733–1815), and the French count
Constantin Volney (1757–1820) (Gran-Aymerich 2001: 696–7; Iversen 1993
(1961); Pope 1975: 54) had travelled to Egypt and documented its monu-
ments. Yet, the diYculties of travelling in a Muslim country under Ottoman
rule and, above all, the lack of translatable texts meant that less was known
about ancient Egypt than about Greece or Rome. This started to change as a
result of the arrival of the French in Egypt.
Some authors have suggested that the motive behind Napoleon’s decision
to take a large group of scientists, 167 in all, with him to Egypt was his craving
to be admitted to the Academy of Sciences. In fact, this was not theWrst time
he had organized this type of enterprise. Napoleon had undertaken a similar
project, though on a smaller scale, during the Rhine and Italian campaigns
3 British fears for Napoleon’s presence in Greece led to the presence in Morea of Colonel
William Martin Leake (1777–1860), a military geographer who was sent to Morea in 1802 and
later in 1804–10. Witmore argues that ‘The competing interests of Britain and France are critical
to an understanding of Leake’s antiquarian practice’ (Witmore 2004: 137).
The French Revolution 73