Napoleon, the first Egyptologist

Although Napoleon Bonaparte had come to Egypt as a conqueror, his military campaign ending in failure, he succeeded in another totally unrelated venture. He gave birth to the science of Egyptology. Say what? Under the guise of wanting to free the Egyptians from the Ottoman Empire, Napoleon’s goal was to make Egypt a province of the French Republic and extend French domination as far as possible. He didn’t succeed. Utterly defeated, he abandoned his troops and returned to France where he nevertheless crowned himself Emperor. That was the end of that, but not so for Egyptology. 

The defeat aside, 500 civilians accompanied the French army, many of them scholars, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, naturalists, architects, draughtsmen, and printers. Having been brought to Egypt by Napoleon, these scholars and scientists undertook the drawing and cataloguing of everything from monuments, buildings, statues (including the noseless Sphinx), and temples to the flora and fauna abounding in the Nile region. They also included the Egyptians’ clothing and dress, household furniture, coins, musical instruments as well as detailed land maps. Basically, they recorded almost everything that could possibly be recorded. 

The engravers then started work on the publication of “Description de l’Egypte”, a project which took twenty years—about as long as the building of Khufu’s pyramid. The entire work, containing over 800 engravings and 3000 illustrations was published in ten volumes and two anthologies, and is still published to this day, albeit in one huge volume. 

In addition to the drawings and engravings, the French expedition unearthed the famous Rosetta stone, the key to understanding hieroglyphs. The stone, named after the location at which it was discovered, bore text written in three distinct languages: Hieroglyphs, Demotic (the spoken Egyptian language), and Greek. Using this, Jean-Francois Champollion, a linguistic prodigy—he apparently taught himself Arabic at the age of five—deciphered the hieroglyphs, a feat which many before him had attempted without success. 

All these accomplishments came about as the result of Napoleon’s thirst for conquest and glory. A defeated conqueror turned founder of a new science. Who’d have thought? The only thing I can think of is how funny Napoleon the Egyptologist would have looked in shorts, a Tilley hat on his head, and his hand tucked in his shirt, addressing his troops with his famous “Soldiers, from the height of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you. . .”