Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The Description de l'Egypte is a reproduction of the Napoleonic Egyptian Expedition's work. The book consists only of plates (with a very brief 3 page introduction) most of which are in black and white although a few are in colour. It contains sections on antiquities, contemporary Egypt (at the time of the expedition), as well as sections on flora, fauna and mineralogy.
There is no commentary on the plates and they are presented without any explanation of their ordering. This can be disorienting at first but one quickly comes to realize that, for each location, plates describing general details come first and are followed by plates with progressively greater detail. For example, a description of the Isle de Philae begins with a map showing its location, a more detailed map of the island, then several views of the island from different angles and then architectural drawings of the temples on the island. It ends with details of the temple carvings and hieroglyphics.
This book serves as a magnificent addendum to almost any Egyptian history text, providing great depth and detail of illustration of most of the major sites in Egypt. Even illustrated texts (ie. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt) do not approach the same level of visual detail as the Description.
There are two quibbles about the book's format that lead me to give the book 4 stars instead of 5. The first is that the book is too small. It is a paperback with 1008 pages, and not a very large paperback at that. This book would have been truly great (albeit much more expensive) if it had been a full-size hardcover. The second detail is that the plate captions are untranslated. This may be a concern to you if you do not speak French.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Egyptian history or archeology. It might also be an interesting tool for those interested in architecture or design, given its attention to fine details of early Egyptian constructions.
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In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte launched an expedition of 35,000 soldiers to conquer Egypt. The campaign was a military and political disaster but nonetheless it had a profound and lasting impact, by revealing the splendour of a mysterious and forgotten civilization. For Napoleon's ships also carried some 500 scholars, scientists and artists whose task it was to study the country and its customs. Traversing a country at war under the stifling heat of southern Egypt, they embarked on the first major study of a land then all but unknown to Europeans. They discovered the Valley of the Kings outside Thebes. They found the Rosetta stone which when deciphered enabled scholars to read hieroglyphics. And their combined efforts culminated in what is surely one of the most ambitiously comprehensive work ever published: the Description de I'Egypte in 10 volumes with 837 copperplate engravings and more than 3,000 drawings. It was as though they were cataloguing the world's richest museum covering three major themes with their work: "Antiqutes," "Etat Moderne" and "Histoire Naturelle," the first two of which are reproduced fully in this special edition.
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