The map of the French Expedition and its consequences
I found this scanned map in the Societe de Geographie de L'Egypte in the premises of the Egyptian's Parliment in downtown Cairo. I was searching for a historical maps that would show the extents of the old city. None of the employees of this huge inistitutional archive knew anything about this map, its author or even the context of its production. One interesting thing about this map is the note written at the margin.
"Note: The details of the map of Cairo in 1930 has been slightly modified to be rectified with the map of Napoleon. Only the modern principle throughfares have been drawn here."
It is widely argued that the arrival of the French expedition in to Egypt in 1798, has introduced the country to ‘modernity’ . Yet this introduction was merely an encounter that did not entail a real involvement with the process of modernity itself. Both J. Abu-Loghod and A. Raymond agree that the real process of ‘modernization’ occurred by the beginning of the reign of Mohamed Ali in 1805 when he introduced the new disciplinary systems of control (Abu-Lughod, 1971; Raymond A. , 2000). The expedition was divided into a military wing and a scientific one that consisted of scholars or ‘savants’ as mentioned in the French records. In 1798, Napoleon signed an order to establish a scientific research academy modeled after the Institut de France, located in the spacious palace of the Mamluk Amir Hassan el Kashif (Figure D). The palace housed the library, workshops and the accommodation of 150 to 200 civilians of the best scholars from the Commission of Sciences and Arts in France. Their goal was to examine systematically the aspects of contemporary and ancient Egyptian civilization, their research extended to mapping the natural facilities and resources of the country (Byrd, 1998). Working under the umbrella of a military campaign the institute devoted a lot of its workshops to the production and invention of armors and weaponry devices as well as the socio-economic analysis of the ways Egypt was administered and controlled. Melanie Byrd argues that beyond the fact that this research was needed for the colonization of Egypt, the scientific campaign enhanced France’s cultural prestige. She argues that Napoleon had offered his scientists the resources and the military protection to record and map the ancient sites to claim that the French had ‘rediscovered’ or ‘restored’ a great ancient culture. The French scholars were explicit about the way they perceived the significance of their work; Egypt was the birth place of European wisdom. Yet the rule of the Ottomans and the Mamluks had forced the nation to a state of barbarism and ignorant superstition (Byrd, 1998).
Yet looking generally at the French expedition that lasted only three years between 1798 and 1801, one could claim that the military campaign was a failure while the associated cultural appropriation of Egypt had a lasting effect on European culture (Peters, 2009).
Surveying Egypt and the encyclopedic gaze
The most prominent product of this institute was the magnum opus of Le Description de L’Egypte (Oliver, 2012). The whole 20 volumes were dedicated for mapping the country, in cartographic and non-cartographic forms (Lutsky, 1969). In spite of its acclaimed objective empirical knowledge, the book had various visual and representational techniques by which the scholars established a sense of mastery and control over the land they wished to colonize (Oliver, 2012). Thus this production is not only an act of power since it was charted by the authority in power, and a tool of sustaining power and control over the subjects of knowledge, it is also a product in which power is embedded through knowledge.
It is worth mentioning that Cairo was mapped twice in different scales in the Description First in the volume titled Etat Moderne or the Modern State (which is the map discussed in this paper, Figure C) and second in the Atlas Geographie (Figure E) that contained more than 50 cartes géographiques et topographique. The atlas is considered the first modern cartographic mapping of Egypt, as it uses Mercator Projections, instead of the sketchy ways used by earlier mappers and travelers for Egypt. This probably goes parallel to David Harvey’s assumption that by the beginning of the project of modernity in the eighteenth century, extraordinary intellectual effort was made to “develop objective science, universal morality and law” (Harvey, 1992). Accordingly these efforts were resonated in the modern mapping techniques that claimed neutral objectivity and precise measurements (Harley, 2001). Yet it is worth mentioning that the French surveyors did not start from scratch. The map of Egypt by D’Anville 1765 (Figure F) was the most comprehensive map the scholars of the French Expedition have found of the Nile Valley and the Delta. Although the map did not provide much accuracy since it was compiled from other books and earlier maps instead of being drawn with empirical observations and measurements, it provided a starting base for the French surveyors (Russell, 2005)
