Egypt Revealed
Scenes from Napoleon's Description de l'Egypte

In anticipation of his invasion of Egypt in 1798, Napoleon formed a Commission of Arts and Science, made up of 165 French scholars in many fields of learning. The result of their efforts was the monumental Description de l'Egypte, a massive attempt to record all aspects of life in early nineteenth-century Egypt. This undertaking took more than thirty years to complete and yielded twenty-six volumes of text plus eleven elephant folio volumes of plates produced by 400 engravers and 1,600 other artisans. But the very sumptuousness of the book has always kept it virtually out of sight. Anderson and Fawzi have taken the obvious, long overdue step of excerpting the Description's plates, and making a selection of 196 splendid engravings available to a wider audience. With the help of five other contributors, they have attached brief but useful explanations to each picture. Full color reproductions would have made this book prohibitively expensive, one knows, but it is still a shame that all the reproductions are in black and white. Now, the editors should take the next step and produce an equally useful volume of texts excerpted from the Description.