Mirage : Napoleon's scientists and the unveiling of Egypt /
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Two centuries ago, only the most reckless Europeans dared traverse the Middle East. Its history and peoples were the subject of myth and speculation--and no region aroused greater interest than Egypt. It was not until 1798, when an unlikely band of scientific explorers traveled from Paris to the Nile Valley, that Westerners received their first real glimpse of what lay beyond the Mediterranean. Under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte, a small corps of Paris's brightest left the safety of their laboratories, studios, and classrooms to embark into the unknown--some never to see French shores again. Over 150 astronomers, mathematicians, naturalists, physicists, doctors, chemists, engineers, botanists, artists--even a poet and a musicologist--accompanied Napoleon's troops into Egypt. They approached the land not as colonizers, but as experts in their fields of scholarship, meticulously categorizing and collecting their finds, and secured their place in history as the world's earliest-known archaeologists.--From publisher description.
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xv, 286 pages, [16] pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm. :
Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-269) and index. :
9780060597689
American travelers on the Nile : early U.S. visitors to Egypt, 1774-1839 /
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The Treaty of Ghent signed in 1814, ending the War of 1812, allowed Americans once again to travel abroad. Medical students went to Paris, artists to Rome, academics to Gottingen, and tourists to all European capitals. More intrepid Americans ventured to Athens, to Constantinople, and even to Egypt. Beginning with two eighteenth-century travellers, this book then turns to the 25-year period after 1815 that saw young men from East Coast cities, among them graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, travelling to the lands of the Bible and of the Greek and Latin authors they had first known as teenagers. Drawing on unpublished letters and diaries together with previously neglected newspaper accounts, as well as a handful of published accounts, this book offers a new look at the early American experience in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean world. More than thirty illustrations complement the stories told by the travellers themselves.
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xxi, 412 pages, 20 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color), map ; 24 cm. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9774166671
9789774166679 :
Omnia