Napoleon in Egypt

On July 1, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, along with 55,000 French troops (Armée d'Orient) and 167 "savants" (artists and scholars) arrived in Egypt on a complicated mission that had at least three goals. One was to impose French liberty upon the Egyptian people. Another was to create a roadblock between England and India. A third, and ultimately the only successful one, was to make a meticulous scholarly study of Egypt. It took till 1829, long after Napoleon, for the issuance of Déscription de l'Égypte, which is said to have laid the foundation of the modern field of Egyptology. (1829 was also the year in which Paris received the Luxor Obelisk, which the city sensibly put in the Place de la Concorde, whereas New York put its Obelisk in a very different setting, on a mound in Central Park, where the only framed axial view of the monument is from within the Petrie European Sculpture Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Luxor Obelisk, Place de la Concorde

Obelisk, Central Park

Through September 3, the fabulous Dahesh Museum is presenting Napoleon on the Nile: Soldiers, Artists, and the Rediscovery of Egypt.

Déscription de l'Égypte, 2nd ed., frontispiece

The Déscription numbered thirteen volumes of plates that in addition to being an unexampled scholarly resource also influenced the "Orientalism" of 19th-century art that has been covered so beautifully over the years by the Dahesh. The current exhibition brings together 80 engraved plate illustrations from the Déscription, together with a wealth of materials, from letters and documents to Egyptian antiquities to artworks (by Doré, Alma-Tadema, and others) from the Dahesh collection. Sounds to us like the summer's must-see show.

N.B. There are 22 Egyptian obelisks left in the world. Thirteen are in Rome, one is in Paris, one is in Istanbul, one is in London, one is in New York, five are in Egypt. New Yorkers should show a little more love for theirs.

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The earliest temple obelisk still in its original position is the 20.7 m / 68 ft high 120 tons red granite Obelisk of Senusret I of the XIIth Dynasty at Al-Matariyyah part of Heliopolis.