Many opportunities for contact with ideas or objects associated with Egypt existed in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Crusades provided a new means by which Near Eastern elements could find their way to Europe, and Europeans might find their way to the Near East. Throughout this period Europeans traveled to Egypt and documented their journeys. The popular Travels of SirJohn Mandeville is one example of a widely-read, albeit fake, travel account which discusses the land of the Nile. Written around 1356 the work could be found in every major European language by 1400, with a vast number of manuscripts available by 1500 (Moseley 1983: 9). Numerous other travel accounts from this period are easy to find (IFAO; Carre 1932 and 1956).
The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed Europeans bringing more than travel accounts back from Egypt. Voyages conducted expressly for the collection of Egyptian antiquities began to take place (Baines and Malek 1980: 22). An interest in Egypt also became explicit through the adoption of Egyptian motifs in European art and architecture (Curran 2007). Similarly, a clear interest in the symbols carved and written on Egyptian objects developed around this time, with Athanasius Kircher’s (1602-1680) attempts to translate the now dead, Hieroglyphic language. Kircher based his work on classical texts, such as that of Horapollo (Greener 1966: 142), and prompted a new interest in Coptic (Bierbrier 1995b: 229).
It was also during the seventeenth century that Europeans made the first scientific attempts to explore Egypt. John Greaves’ 1646 Pyramidographia incorporated
Humanist scholarship in an attempt to quantify and qualify Egyptian pyramids (Greener 1966: 54; Wortham 1971: 19-23; Bierbrier 1995b: 176; Lehner 1997: 44) while other scholars began to study subjects other than isolated objects, hieroglyphs, and pyramids. Claude Sicard, for example, undertook an exact investigation of the Egyptian monuments between 1707 and 1726 for the Regent Philippe of Orleans. This study correctly identified several sites and monuments using classical texts. While Sicard’s manuscript was lost, letters on his work were preserved and later formed the basis for Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville’s 1765 map of Egypt. This map was later incorporated into the Napoleonic Description de I’Egypte (Greener 1966: 70-3). In 1735 the letters of Benoit de Maillet, at one time the French Ancien Consul in Cairo, were published by Jean Baptiste le Mascrier. This text discussed contemporary Egypt as a doomed, despotic, ailing state and later lent ideological weight to Napoleon’s invasion (Laurens 1999: 3).
European travel to Egypt increased in the early 1700s due in part to a diffusion of publications on the country (Leclant 1999: 125). Two such works were Frederik Ludvig Norden’s Travels in Egypt and Nubia, originally published in 1741, and Richard Pococke’s A Description of the East and some other countries, originally published in 1743. Both Norden’s and Pococke’s work provided strong visual records of Egypt’s monuments and included plans and maps. During the eighteenth century, along with an increase in European travelers, came improved studies of ancient Egypt, as demonstrated by the works of Bernard de Montfaucon, published between 1719 and 1724, and Baron de Caylus, published between 1752 and 1764 (Baines and Malek 1980: 24). As a result, by the end of the eighteenth century, we can see that popular and academic knowledge of Egypt, including its antiquities, natural environment, culture and peoples, had been available to Europeans long before Napoleon set foot on Alexandrian soil.
World History
