With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, hundreds of French scientists came to the Nile. Their findings are now exhibited in museums in England and France.
Napoleon's campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) can be described as a pharaonic enterprise of modern times. The deployment of French forces is colossal, with nearly 40 men and some 000 ships. And the defeat of Bonaparte's army, besieged by Nelson and the Mamluks, is resounding. But Napoleon's invasion also brought hundreds of French scientists to the Nile, who turned Egypt into a veritable modern laboratory. They are at the origin of the discovery of the treasures which are today exposed in the museums of England and France.
Revolutionary France did not just want to dominate an area under the Ottoman Empire and block Britain's eastern route to India. She also sought to repair the colonial setbacks suffered during the Seven Years' War. Napoleon wanted not only to prolong his victories in Italy, but also to imitate Alexander the Great himself. Imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and its civilizing mission, the French also wanted to spread the Enlightenment among a people they considered backward, but who had been "the cradle of civilization".
Napoleon's 150 scientists in Egypt
Some 150 scientists accompanied Napoleon's French troops. They were engineers, geographers, naturalists, doctors, architects, cartographers and astronomers. The figure of the academician of the Ancien Régime gives way to a learned citizen, committed to the State and the progress of humanity.
Napoleon created a Science and Arts Commission, made up of the most eminent members of the National Institute of France, heir to the Royal Academy of Sciences, abolished by the Convention in 1793. Like this institute and with the researchers of this commission, he founded theInstitute of Egypt in Cairo, a pioneering institution of Egyptology, still in operation and which suffered serious losses in a fire during the Arab Spring in 2011.
The Egyptian Laboratory
During Napoleon Bonaparte's military campaigns, Egypt became a laboratory, the scene of important discoveries in various scientific disciplines.
The possibility of building a passage through the Suez Canal is studied and maps are drawn up to Upper Egypt.
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire studied and had native zoological species drawn. Lelorgne de Savigny produced a natural and mythological history of the ibis (Natural and mythological history of the ibis), whose mummified remains were used by Georges Cuvier to argue that species did not change over time, before Darwin's arrival.
The mathematician Gaspar Monge (1746-1818), Count of Peluse, one of the fathers of descriptive geometry, was also one of the greatest confidants of the young General Napoleon during the Egyptian campaign. There he studied the optical phenomenon of mirages in the desert. He returned to France with Napoleon on August 23, 1799, the year in which he published his famous work Descriptive geometry.
Berthollet, one of the creators of modern chemical nomenclature, analyzed the lakes of Natrun west of Cairo and the reactions that took place between salt and calcium carbonate.
Conté, a wise man – it was said – “who had all the sciences in his head and all the arts in his hand”, had a printing press built which gave birth to the Description of Egypt (1809-1829), a sumptuous work in 23 volumes bringing together the work of the commission and comprising 837 fabulous copper engravings. It is a monument of the history of science, illustrated like few others, a useful encyclopedia for anyone who wants to learn about Egypt and how we came to build this object of knowledge and this discipline called Egyptology .
The political power of knowledge
In its Orientalism (1978), Edward Said exposed the relations between power and knowledge which structure the vision of the other in the West, this dominating way of representing other cultures and of manufacturing knowledge about them. But it is not only a question of the scientific appropriation of one culture by another. As pointed out by Mª Luisa Ortega, a Spanish teacher who has done his doctoral thesis on the Napoleonic expedition, the Description of Egypt was also a search for the roots of the accumulated and classified knowledge of theEncyclopedia, the recapitulation of a science that was becoming aware of its power.
Their studies of the temples, archaeological remains and cultures of Lower and especially Upper Egypt revealed places such as Thebes, Luxor and Dendera, where the famous zodiac, a bas-relief sculpted on the ceiling of a chamber dedicated to Osiris. The, Dominique Vivant Denon, an artist and diplomat traveling with the troops, said he felt "in the sanctuary of science and the arts."
The trophies exhibited in France
Today, the Dendera Zodiac is exhibited in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Years later, Egypt gave France the Obelisk of Luxor, which stands in the Place de la Concorde. And what about the Rosetta stone, the stele inscribed in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphic characters which allowed Champollion to unveil the mysteries of a language that had been indecipherable until then? It was seized by the British, which explains why it is now kept in the British Museum.
Was the art of confiscation of property a new branch of the exact sciences, as Christopher Herold wrote, and would these properties have been better preserved if they had remained in Egypt?
The issue of cultural appropriation and policies for the restitution of cultural property are today arousing considerable controversy. One thing is certain: for the modern era, it is impossible to separate the history of science from that of the colonial empires.
Juan Pimentel, Investigator of the Department of Historia de la Ciencia, Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (CCHS – CSIC)
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.