Download Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt by Nina Burleigh PDF

By Nina Burleigh

Little greater than 2 hundred years in the past, in basic terms the main reckless or eccentric Europeans had dared traverse the unmapped territory of the modern day heart East. Its historical past and peoples have been the topic of a lot delusion and speculation—and no sector aroused larger curiosity than Egypt, the place studies of mysterious monuments, inscrutable hieroglyphics, infrequent silks and spices, and rumors of misplaced magical wisdom tantalized dreamers and taunted the power-hungry.

It used to be no longer till 1798, whilst an not going band of clinical explorers traveled from Paris to the Nile Valley, that Westerners obtained their first genuine glimpse of what lay past the Mediterranean Sea.

lower than the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and the French military, a small and little-known corps of Paris's brightest highbrow lighting fixtures left the security in their laboratories, studios, and study rooms to embark on a thirty-day crossing into the unknown—some by no means to work out French shorelines back. Over a hundred and fifty astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists, medical professionals, chemists, engineers, botanists, artists—even a poet and a musicologist—accompanied Napoleon's troops into Egypt. wearing pencils rather than swords, specimen jars rather than box weapons, those hugely entire males participated within the first large-scale interplay among Europeans and Muslims of the fashionable period. and plenty of lived to inform the story.

Hazarding starvation, problem, uncertainty, and sickness, Napoleon's scientists risked their lives in pursuit of discovery. They approached the land no longer as colonizers, yet as specialists of their fields of scholarship, meticulously categorizing and amassing their finds—from the ruins of the monstrous pyramids to the smallest bugs to the mythical Rosetta Stone.

those that survived the three-year day trip compiled an exhaustive encyclopedia of Egypt, twenty-three volumes in size, which secured their position in heritage because the world's earliest-known archaeologists. Unraveling the mysteries that had befuddled Europeans for hundreds of years, Napoleon's scientists have been the 1st to rfile the staggering accomplishments of a misplaced civilization—before the darkish shadow of empire-building took Africa and the center East by way of hurricane.

across the world acclaimed journalist Nina Burleigh brings readers again to a little-known landmark event on the sunrise of the fashionable era—one that eventually published the inner most secrets and techniques of old Egypt to a really curious continent.

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Extra info for Mirage: Napoleon's Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt

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The Egyptian writer Abd al-Rahman al Jabarti, who chronicled the French occupation from the Arab point of view, described Murad as a complex epicure—a man who preferred associates who were “hard, brave, and cruel” but who also chose men of letters and taste as his confidants. He enjoyed the good life, and spent long periods without leaving the pleasures of his Giza palace. He was famously generous to his Mameluke followers, but fleeced the native Egyptians, as had his predecessors. The French artist André Dutertre, who sketched most of Napoleon’s scholars in profile during their time in Egypt, sketched Murad’s portrait at his home, capturing his piercing look, bushy pale beard, flowing robes.

Plato thought pharaonic Egypt was the primordial source of human culture, and that its people existed in a golden age of civilization. Arabs in the Middle Ages and Renaissance European scholars maintained the notion that the Egyptians had access to lost esoteric knowledge. A few intrepid European travelers had recently contributed detailed, if delirious, observations on the modern Islamic nation. All together, classical and contemporary accounts had produced an image that was faithful to reality—desert, ancient monuments, and Muslims—but also fantastic—medicinal mummies and lost magical arts, awash in gold, silks, and perfumes, ruled by men who lived and died by the ruby-crusted saber.

But at every step, this precious water fled, always remaining at the same distance. It gave us an ever-renewing hope that at the same time duped us. ” As the hours passed, stupefied soldiers stopped hearing the complaints and moans of their comrades, or even noticing those who fell to the ground next to them, dying of heatstroke. “I saw them fall, almost at my feet, without being moved, so much did personal sufferings close one’s heart to all feelings of humanity,” Bernoyer wrote. The army’s chief surgeon, Dominique Larrey, accompanied the first wave of soldiers into the desert.

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