The first volume of Vivant Denon’s vast and magisterial Description de l’Égypte was published in 1809, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), its title page proclaiming that it was ‘published by the order of His Majesty Emperor Napoleon the Great’:
For the rest of Napoleon’s life, and indeed after it, further volumes of this truly extraordinary work appeared, finally numbering twenty-one and constituting a monument in the history of scholarship and publishing. The savants had missed nothing. From Cairo, Thebes, Luxor, Karnak, Aswan and all the other sites of Ancient Egyptian temples, there were immensely detailed scale drawings (20 inches by 27) in both colour and black and white of obelisks, sphinxes, hieroglyphics, cartouches, pyramids and sexually aroused pharaohs, as well as mummified birds, cats, snakes and dogs. (According to volume twelve, King Ozymandias didn’t have a ‘wrinkl’d lip and sneer of cold command’ as Shelley suggests, but a rather engaging smile.)
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The savants’ greatest discovery was the Rosetta Stone, a stele in three languages found at El-Rashid in the Delta.
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Under the peace agreement covering the French withdrawal in 1801, the Stone was handed over to the British and sent to the British Museum, where it still safely resides.
Tragically, the Institut near Tahrir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all its 192,000 books, journals and other manuscripts — including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon’s Description de l’Égypte — were destroyed.
Wondering if the British Museum can survive demographic change.