Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt

  • Nina Burleigh
Harper: 2007. 304 pp. $25.95 9780060597672 | ISBN: 978-0-0605-9767-2

The unexpected invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798–1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte's army, accompanied by 151 French scientists, scholars and artists, is a rich and shimmering subject. It was, as Nina Burleigh puts it, “the ultimate Romantic adventure”.

For more than three years, the French roamed the Nile valley and its surrounding desert, investigating every accessible detail of its archaeology and natural history — from pyramids and hieroglyphs, to crocodiles and scarab beetles. The wonders of ancient Egypt were revealed to Europe in the expedition's monumental publication, Description de l'Égypte (1809–28). Perhaps the most important discovery of all, in 1799, was the Rosetta Stone, which eventually allowed the pharaohs and their subjects to speak to the modern world.

Much has been written about this adventure from disparate angles. The historian of science Charles Coulston Gillispie chronicled its progress in a section of his magisterial Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (2004). The British Museum Egyptologist Richard Parkinson discussed its significance to archaeology in Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment (1999). The literary critic Edward Said, in his influential Orientalism (1978), indicted Napoleon and his expedition for making scholarship subservient to imperialism.

More than 150 French scientists and artists catalogued the Nile valley's archaeology and natural history. Credit: G. DAGLI ORTI/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/THE ART ARCHIVE

Yet there has been no general account of the expedition's scientific and cultural aspects in English (Yves Laissus's colourful French book, L'Égypte, une Aventure Savante (1798–1801) has yet to be translated). This is the gap that Burleigh, an American journalist and author, aims to fill with Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt.

The challenge is formidable. A grasp of French, British and Middle Eastern history is essential; almost as important is an understanding of the sciences in 1800. Although disciplines were nowhere near as distinct as they are today, the expedition boasted specialists such as Joseph Fourier, Pierre Berthollet, Jules Savigny and Vivant Denon, in fields from mathematics and chemistry to natural history and art.

Indeed, one of the excitements of the expedition, as Burleigh points out, was its salon atmosphere. Among the experts relaxing in the palaces and gardens of Cairo, commandeered from the defeated Mamelukes, “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.”

Also challenging is to weave a clear and accurate narrative out of the fascinating but messy interactions of politics, scholarship and the military. Napoleon revered Newton and knowledge for knowledge's sake. But once he deserted Egypt in 1799 to grab power in Paris, relations between scientists and soldiers became tense and at times murderous. When the French general finally capitulated to the British in 1801, he wrote caustically to his opposite military number: “Several among our collection-makers wish to follow their seeds, minerals, birds, butterflies, or reptiles wherever you choose to ship their crates. I do not know if they wish to have themselves stuffed for the purpose, but I can assure you that if the idea should appeal to them, I shall not prevent them.”

Burleigh structures her book chronologically, more or less, yet tries simultaneously to focus on one field of endeavour per chapter. So we get: 'The Inventor' (Nicolas Conté, inventor of the graphite pencil), or 'The Zoologist' (Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, whose work influenced Darwin's theory of evolution), or 'The Stone'. The result is a somewhat confusing narrative in which, say, Napoleon's successor is first assassinated by a Muslim fanatic and then appears to oversee the despatch of field expeditions up the Nile. Although the individuals and their relationships come to life, and the descriptions of Egypt are vivid, these do not compensate for the lack of a coherent story.

Of the science, there is remarkably little; and some of that is misleading or wrong. A mere sentence is devoted to Gaspard Monge's theory of the mirage, despite the book's title. Devised from Napoleon's desperate desert march from Alexandria to fight the Battle of the Pyramids, in which soldiers were tormented by 'water' shimmering on the horizon, Monge's theory correctly accounts for mirages as the refraction of light by layers of air of differing density. Burleigh writes of “light and heat bouncing off the Earth's surface that created a mirror effect”.

The discussion of the Rosetta Stone is most unsatisfactory. It puts the hieroglyphs at the bottom, instead of at the top, of the stone. And it neglects several theories of phonetic elements in the hieroglyphs put forward before Jean-François Champollion's (by no means single-handed) phonetic deciphering of 1822. There is no mention, for example, of the phoneticism known to the medieval Arabs that Okasha el-Daly revealed in Egyptology: The Missing Millennium (2005). Elsewhere Burleigh states that Humphry Davy, rather than Benjamin Thompson, disproved the caloric theory of heat, and she seems unaware that William Thomson and Lord Kelvin are the same scientist.

In 2004, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of the city where Napoleon landed, digitized and made available online and on CD the multi-volume Description de l'Égypte, originally issued by the French government. Meanwhile an empire-builder of the twenty-first century was wrecking the archaeological sites and museums of another great Middle Eastern civilization.

Napoleon, for all his ruthlessness in Egypt, increased, rather than diminished, the world's intellectual heritage. The book that this extraordinary scientific adventure deserves has yet to be written.