Edward Said on Description de l'Egypte

In 1809, the first volume of a monumental intellectual project was published in a book measuring nearly a meter square. Description de l'Egypte was the work of a vast squadron of scientists who accompanied Napoleon's campaign in North Africa. This “teams of chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians” (83/4) were charged with recording all of Egypt in minute detail. It was, as Edward Said writes in Orientalism, was to “put Egypt into modern French … a universal undertaking” (84).

Said considers Description de l'Egypte at some length in Orientalism and deems the massive book a discourse-defining work in the pantheon of Orientalist studies. Description is an example par excellence of the European project to make the Orient known, and knowable, to Westerners.

The production of such knowledge, however, was by no means a transparent exercise of reproducing a distant land for domestic consumption. Description de l'Egypte, like the cannon Orientalist studies that followed it, reduced an entire region of North Africa, with thousands of years of history, to the region's interactions with Europe. Description, in Said's words, displaces the actuality of Egyptian history, and “having described the Orient in modern Occidental terms lifts the Orient from the realms of silent obscurity where it had laid … into the clarity of modern European science” (86). Description literally made it possible for the French to know about Egypt not because its maps, textual descriptions, and engravings accurately conveyed the reality of North Africa, but because the massive texts rendered Egypt in terms comprehensible to Westerners.

This is, as Ania Loomba writes in Colonialism / Postcolonialism, the critical insight at the heart of Orientalism: “knowledge is not innocent but profoundly connected with the operations of power” (42). By commissioning a project like Description, Napoleon ensured military dominance of the Orient was complemented by an all-encompassing intellectual dominance. The French way of knowing Egypt through the eyes of its Orentalists figured the region exclusively in relationship to Europe, and in an explicitly inferior position.

 Said's consideration of Description includes no mention of the copious illustrations and maps. It's an understandable omission: Said was trained as a literary scholar, and accordingly was primarily concerned with the analysis of text. It's also relevant that the first edition of Orientalism was published in 1978, at a time when scholars were just beginning to publish studies on visual culture.

Fortunately, other scholars have picked up where Said left off: the geographer Anne Godlewska offers an analysis of Description in her article, “Map, text and image The mentality of enlightenedconquerors: a new look at the Description de l'Egypte.” Building on Said's theoretical framework, Godlewska argues, for example, that the illustrations from Description reinforce the French attention to ancient Egypt, and erasure of contemporary Egyptians.

One map, for example depicts ancient ruins in minute detail, but represents a contemporary settlement as only a blank, dark area. Other engravings clearly distinguish between a European gaze that can appreciate, interpret, and make known the glories of ancient Egyptian civilization, and a local, who sits idly by, smoking.

Like Mary Louise Pratt, Godlewska suggests that many scholars have made uncritical use of  her subject matter. Academics have made use of the maps and illustrations in Description uncritically, and have overlooked entirely the ideological subtext of the volume. It's a problem that I might have anticipated when Godlewska was writing in 1995.

It's more surprising to encounter such an uncritical reading of Description in the early 2000s, from the Director of the Library of Alexandria, Ismail Serageldin. In a short video for the World Digital Library, Serageldin describes the large-format edition Description as "works of art of unprecedented accuracy and beauty." "We intend to bring other beautifully rendered collections to the World Digital Library," Serageldin effuses, "to make our Egyptian heritage available to the world." 

I'm hesitant to completely dismiss Serageldin's comments as evidence of the on-going triumph of Orientalism in academic communities today. Serageldin is, after all, an Egyptian national: maybe there's a way to think about his comments from the perspective of Pratt's transculturation, where a citizen of a formerly colonized nation appropriates the tools of the colonizer, bound in red leather, for a new national agenda. In any case, his comments are certainly evidence for the way the ideas at the core of Said's Orientalism are relevant more than twenty-five years after their initial publication.