DESCRIPTION DE L EGYPTE: EDITION COMPLETE= VOLLSTÄNDIGER NACHDRUC K= COMPLETE EDITION

English / French / GermanDescription of Egypt - Egyptian culture commissioned in 1798 by NapoleonIn 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 Napoleons 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 lEgypte in 10 volumes with 837 copperplate engravings and more than 3,000 drawings. It was as though they were cataloguing the worlds richest museum.

These illustration are reproduced again 200 years later in one luscions volume offering a fascinating and detailed record of the architecture, culture, customs, flora and fauna in the land of the Nile.