Napoleon in Egypt (51 page)

Denon records his relief over his arrival at Aswan: “To undress, to sit down, to lie down and go to sleep seemed to me a truly voluptuous ease.”
²⁹
He was not alone in feeling this way, and making himself at home:

The soldiers were the same. Within two days of our arrival there had already sprouted up in the streets tailors’ shops, boot-menders, trinket-stalls, French barbers with their signs, food stalls and restaurants with fixed-price menus . . . what particularly characterizes a French army is its ability to cater at the same time, and with the same care, for both the superfluous and the necessary; there were gardens set up, as well as cafés, and public gaming tables using cards the soldiers had made themselves in Aswan. The road north out of the village was a tree-lined avenue, and here the soldiers placed a military column inscribed: “Road to Paris No. 1,167,340.” All this, just a few days after their daily rations had been down to only a few dates . . . Death alone can put an end to such bravado and gaiety; even the greatest unhappiness can never extinguish it.

French spies soon established that the Mamelukes were starving and had taken to marauding, preying on the few Sudanese villages they came across. It was only a matter of time before they would return to Egypt once more. In order to secure the southern border against Mameluke raids, Belliard led an expedition upriver to occupy the strategic island of Philae. As this was known to contain many ruins, including the spectacular Temple of Isis, Denon decided to join the expedition.
^*
But this was to be no mere sightseeing tour, as the inhabitants of the island were known for their ferocity, having even resisted the Mamelukes. While the French craft approached, the islanders put up an intimidating display, the women screeeching and throwing dust into the air in their ritual battle chant. But they were not prepared for modern fighting tactics. When the first French soldiers landed, undercover of cannon fire, the islanders were terrified, as Denon recorded:

Men, women and children all threw themselves into the river to save themselves by swimming; in keeping with the ferocity of their character, we saw the mothers drowning the children they could not carry with them, and they mutilated the girls to preserve them from the ravaging of their conquerors. When I set foot on the island next day I found a little girl of seven or eight who had been brutally and cruelly sewn up in such a way as to prevent her even from relieving herself, which state had now reduced her to terrible convulsions. Only by making a counter-operation and giving her a bath did I manage to save the life of this unfortunate little creature, who was extremely beautiful. Other girls, of a more advanced age, showed a less puritan outlook and chose for themselves amongst their conquerors.
³⁰

This was the furthest south the French progressed, and they would leave behind them a large inscription carved into the grand gate of the Temple of Isis, commemorating the arrival in Egypt of the French army under Bonaparte, and going on to describe how “Desaix, commander of the First Division, pursued [the Mamelukes] beyond the Cataracts where he arrived on 13th Ventôse Year 7, 3rd March 1799
AD
, inscribed here by Castex, sculptor.”
^*
31

Desaix had left Aswan soon after his arrival, instructing Belliard to install himself and prevent any Mameluke incursions as best he could. Meanwhile Desaix set about securing the northern regions of Upper Egypt. This proved to be no mean task, as the Mamelukes soon began skirting around Belliard at Aswan, and launching raids north into the Nile valley. But Desaix was determined to establish order, and to this end he placed small garrisons in towns and villages at fifty-mile intervals along the Nile. This was intended to protect his supply lines, as well as to reassure the locals that they had no need to fear any reprisals from the Mamelukes, for the French were here to stay. But it did not have the desired effect, as the Mamelukes continued carrying out raids, and on more than one occasion actually wiped out an entire French garrison. They were still receiving support from the “Meccans,” who continued to cross the Red Sea, arriving at Kosseir in their thousands and making their way across the eastern desert to join up with the Mameluke beys. Every time Desaix caught up with the reinforced Mameluke brigades, he continued to defeat them, inflicting heavy losses. Yet as he wrote to Napoleon: “I report to you,
mon général
, that the Mamelukes are beaten, but they are not defeated. They are like the mythical Hydra of ancient Greece, no sooner have you cut off one head than another one appears.”
³²
But Desaix was a masterful commander, and he continued to pursue the Mamelukes wherever they went, constantly dogging them until they were worn out. He knew that he could rely on his troops: they respected him, but they also knew that there was good bounty to be had from the fallen Mamelukes, who continued to carry their treasure with them in the form of bracelets, pouches of gold coins and jewels. Like Napoleon, Desaix was a general who inspired his men, who were proud to follow him and proud of their unit—a loyalty that is reflected in their graffiti. Alongside their name some men would add the date, others the name of their home town in France, but by far the majority proudly added the name of their fighting unit: “le 21me,” “21,” “Chasseur 21,” etc.

Eventually Desaix and Belliard managed to drive the Mamelukes from the Nile valley in a pincer movement, inflicting heavy losses. While Desaix made sure there were no further incursions, Belliard led an expedition across the eastern desert to the Red Sea port of Kosseir, which he occupied without opposition, thus cutting off the Mamelukes’ last hope of reinforcements from Arabia. Desaix’s victory is generally recognized as one of the most brilliantly conducted military campaigns of its time, his generalship second only to that of his young commander-in-chief. With Upper Egypt now secured, the French became the rulers of all Egypt.

Desaix now set about establishing a permanent administration with the aim of winning over the people. Here “The Just Sultan” came into his own: trade along the Nile was re-established; the caravans to Cairo from Nubia and beyond were able to proceed unmolested; and with the aid of Moallam Jacob, the
miry
was soon being collected with the minimum of fuss. Even Nicolas Turc was full of praise: “General Desaix devoted himself to the pacification and organization of Upper Egypt with an intelligence, administrative good sense, tact, courage, zeal and magnanimity that were admirable—so much so that Upper Egypt was better governed than the Delta.”
³³

Yet Desaix was no selfless administrator, and “The Just Sultan” proved as much of a sultan as he was just, as can be seen from this revealing letter he wrote to a woman friend back in France:

Let me tell you a word about my love life. I have loved the young Astiza, a nice Georgian girl, beautiful as Venus, blonde and sweet. She is fourteen years old, with two rosy budding breasts; she belonged to me by right of succession as governor of the city; her master was dead . . . I received as a present Sarah, a bright little scamp of an Abyssinian, aged fifteen. She was my traveling companion. I also had Mara, a naïve child from Tigray [northern Abyssinia]. As well as her I had Fatma [
sic
], large, beautiful, fine figure, who was very unhappy.
³⁴

He explains that she was unable “to share in my pleasures, my joys, my sensual delights” because in childhood she had undergone female circumcision. “Such is my harem,” he wrote, “which also includes three black women . . . a little black boy called Baquil, a little Mameluke boy called Ismaël, beautiful as an angel.” He paints a vivid picture of himself at ease within his harem, “with myself reclining languidly on two cushions, attended by several of my wives, one now falling voluptuously asleep whilst tenderly rubbing my feet, another now undressing me, looking after me with a lightness of touch and care which is unknown in Europe.” Even Desaix’s biographer Armand Sauzet later felt the need to omit certain passages from this letter, suggesting that Desaix “was no doubt exaggerating . . . because he wished to appear as a ‘womanizer.’”
³⁵
Sauzet goes on to make the interesting claim that by this stage in his career Desaix “had reached the pinnacle of his intellectual qualities and moral virtues.”

The artist-savant Denon would reap considerable benefit from Desaix’s lauded “intellectual qualities” during this period, to the extent that Denon’s work in Upper Egypt gives him a strong claim to be the father of Egyptology. Desaix encouraged Denon to accompany him on his sorties up and down the Nile valley in pursuit of the Mamelukes, thus giving Denon an opportunity to sketch many of the sights he had been forced to rush past on his initial journey south. It was on one of these sorties that he stumbled upon the Valley of the Kings, which contained the hidden tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs, adorned with many fabulous examples of ancient Egyptian art.

Despite the spectacular nature of Denon’s discoveries, he was in fact not fully aware of the significance of what he saw. At this stage, ancient Egyptian history still remained lost in the mists of time. Even so, his arrival in Cairo with his portfolios full of sketches would mark the beginning of a new interest in ancient Egyptian history, as well as curiosity about the meaning of the strange hieroglyphs that adorned the walls of so many temples. There was a gradual realization that ancient Greece, and the founding of Western civilization, had been preceded by a vast history of what had become a lost civilization: the self-understanding of European culture was about to undergo a dramatic transformation. A good example was the zodiacal disc in the roof of the temple at Dendara, which Denon had sketched with great accuracy. When his drawing was later studied in detail, it became clear that the position of the constellations in the heavens which were depicted on this disc could only have been seen at a date which was much, much earlier than the date previously accepted for the origin of the world. The Dendara Zodiac was estimated to be 15,000 years old, whereas according to the Bible the world had only been created around 6,000 years previously. Desaix’s expedition into Upper Egypt, though hardly a campaign of great historical significance, would in fact transform our understanding of human history.
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XX

A Turn for the Worse

Back in Cairo, the atmosphere of enforced calm established after the uprising showed no sign of being broken, and the French occupation continued as before into the New Year of 1799. A team of savants and engineers had completed a map of the city, and were now collating one of the whole of Lower Egypt, making use of local sketches and theodolite readings sent in by members of the engineering corps from the various garrisons along the coast and in the delta. Meanwhile
Le Courier
continued to regale its readers with its regular ration of gossip, propaganda and the private habits of Egyptian women, while every ten days
La Décade
would report on the meetings of the Institute, which were invariably attended by Napoleon himself. Papers presented at these meetings ran the entire gamut from the ingenious to the opaque. Costaz analyzed the composition of sand in the desert and identified “that alkaline substance which makes it scrunch underfoot like snow,”
¹
while Fourier, who despite his onerous administrative duties still managed to continue doing original mathematics, described his early tentative work on algebraic series in a lecture that was comprehensible to himself alone.
^*

Of more general interest was General Andréossy’s report on the expedition he had undertaken for the Institute, accompanied by the chemist Berthollet, to explore the Natron Lakes in the desert some fifty miles northwest of Cairo. The chemical crust formed around these lake-beds was composed of natron, a form of sodium carbonate crystals, which had been used in ancient times to embalm the dead. Andréossy and his expedition discovered that natron was still being collected from the lakes. “The men enter the water naked, breaking and digging up the natron with a piece of metal weighing around sixty pounds [
sic
], which ends in a sharp point . . . it is a strange sight to see these black or tanned Egyptians emerge white from the salt water.”
²
In the basin of the lakes they came across the remains of trees long since crystallized by the natron, “and we found the vertebrae of a large fish which appeared transformed into mineral.”

Berthollet observed how the natron salt (sesquicarbonate of soda) was formed by the combined action of the sun and the pressure caused by the weight of the crust, and this led him to an important insight into chemical processes. As a result, he would later propose the first modern theory to account for how chemicals reacted with one another, which took into account how pressure and heat could affect reactions. This, together with Fourier’s work on his algebraic series, would be the major theoretical scientific advance to arise out of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, the main practical advances being the foundation of modern Egyptology and the preliminary surveying of the Suez Canal. During the short period since its inception, the Institute had already established itself on a par with the finest similar institutions in the capitals of Europe.

Andréossy’s report on his expedition to the lakes would also include a description of the nearby Coptic monasteries. The Copts were originally the early Christians of Egypt, who had been called by the Greek Christians “Aiguptoi” (i.e., Egyptians), of which the name Copt was a corruption. The Coptic monasteries of the Western Desert housed an ascetic community dating back to St. Anthony in the fourth century, though by the end of the eighteenth century these communities had become a shadow of their former selves, with the monks having lapsed into a life of sloth and grubbiness, utterly dependent on the work carried out by their serfs. As a result of the Institute, the history of Egypt was being opened up on all fronts, with many forgotten elements of the Western tradition, and its pre-history, coming to light for the first time.