September 1, 2010 • 29 mins
When Napoleon planned a secret mission to Egypt, he authorized three men to create a Commission of Sciences and Arts. However, the commission's 151 members soon learned the mission wasn't what they'd expected. Tune in and learn more in this podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and I've been
sending Katie pictures of Egypt all week. I've sent her
(00:20):
a picture of an Ibis, an ancient temple, a mongoose,
and at one point I even got distracted and drew
a laser. Ibis in Microsoft Paint. Was a highlight of
my week and outlook. But usually distraction during podcast research
is not a good thing. In this case, I'm going
to cite the spirit of Napoleon savants, who themselves were
(00:43):
kings of embracing distraction. And we've already given you some
background on Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, the Battle of the Pyramids,
the devastating defeat at the Battle of abukir Bay. Things
get worse for France as the army has to face
a triple threat the Turks, the Brits and Lapeste or
the plague, and the result is a major military failure
(01:05):
and terrible violence and destruction in Egypt. Fortunately, this episode
is dedicated to the French expedition that did not fail.
It was an intellectual expedition that shaped the science of archaeology.
It launched Egyptomania, and it eventually unearthed the key to
the secret history of the Pharaohs, which will get to
(01:25):
pretty soon. So first you have to wonder why Napoleon
brought these savants with him, And there are a few
reasons why it pays to bring a cadre of intellectuals
along for the war. And to break it down simply,
we'll give you a four points here. One who knows
what Egypt will be like. The army will need men
who can survey, who can find water, and who can
(01:47):
make maps, men who can observe and invent and manufacture
on the fly exactly. And they'll also need men who
are diplomatic and the perfect ambassadors of French culture and
democracy to a conquered land. And and what a conquered
land it is. The savants will help record and make
sense of what they see in Egypt and as stuff
(02:09):
the louver and build very impressive natural history collections and
bring Egypt back to France. And finally, perhaps most importantly,
they'll make Napoleon look good. It sounds like something his
hero Alexander the Great would do, and plus Napoleon, We've
got to give him credit for this. He really likes science.
He's this sort of honorary member of the French Institute,
(02:31):
but he takes it really seriously. He signs, he signs
himself for his letters as a member of the French Institute.
He loves science. So as Napoleon plans his secret mission
to Egypt, he authorizes three men to create his Commission
of Sciences and Arts, and they are Gasparmane who's a
very good at math, Claude Luis Bertela who's a chemist,
(02:53):
and Joseph Fourier, another mathematician, and those that round up
his little crew of savants. The commission's total comes to
one and fifty one, and some are well established in
their fields, but many are fresh out of school. Thirty
six of them are students. Their median age is twenty
five and bum bum bum, thirty one will die. We're
(03:14):
just saying this because these guys do not know what
they're getting into. But because they're going with Napoleon, they
think it's going to be really great. It's not, well,
you know, subject opinion, maybe if you're not one of
the so they probably get a taste of just how
adventurous this expedition is going to be. On the boat
ride from France, the established scientists birthed with officers and
(03:38):
attended salons on Napoleon's own flagships, having these very heavy
discussions what did dreams mean? What is the ideal form
of government? But these students are with the lowest of
the soldiers and sailors. They're seasick for getting their blankets stolen.
I have to imagine them just getting punched in the
salt the shoulder, hey point dexter givving a pillow exactly.
(04:01):
So they're not having the best trip, but I guess
they're still excited. And the four hundred ship flotilla finally
arrives in Alexandria on July one, and we've in our
earlier episode we we already know what happens to most
of the army and the navy from here. Fortunately for
the savants, most of them are spared that grueling desert
(04:22):
march and the Battle of the Pyramids. They stay in
Alexandria and Rosetta, which is even nicer than Alexandria, until
Napoleon secures Cairo. They get to travel by boat instead
of foot across the desert. They do have that one
devastating event though, the ship that held nearly all of
their equipment sank, So that's kind of a big deal
(04:43):
and planning. Yeah, So after the Battle of the Pyramids
and the flight of the Mama Luke leader Murad Bay,
Napoleon secures Cairo. We've we've covered this part. But with
the city in his pocket, Napoleon decides that he wants
to form a something like the French National Institute, a
(05:03):
collection of all these learned men where they can meet,
they can pitch their furies and their ideas and discuss
have have intellectual conversations. It's an official club that will
also conveniently tackle some of his mispressing questions. So Mombert
Lay scout the city for suitable quarters, because this building
(05:23):
has got to be huge. It's going to hold labs,
a museum, a library and observatory, a printing press, a zoo,
everything the savants will need. Sarah really wants to go,
and they find a complex of recently vacated mam Luke
palaces that will do the trick. I'm picturing it like
apartment shopping, but for rent. Yeah, walking into a mam
(05:44):
let probably a little class instead of my midtown apartment.
So their first meeting is in late August, and it's
held in the Harem Room, which I imagine is not
like our conference room. Apparently it's sort of the quiet
nicest room in the in these old buildings, so I
guess it makes sense to to set up shop there.
(06:04):
But Napoleon starts them off with really practical projects like
how can we make better ovens, how can we treat
the Nile water? How can we make beer without hops?
And you know they are they are practical questions, and
the savants do get to work on them, but soon
they're they're more interested in all of the amazing new
(06:25):
things they're seeing in Egypt for the first time gets
into studying mirages. The naturalist Etienne Jafoi sant hlaire Um
gets into these proto Darwinian theories, and Bartel starts studying
the natron that's used to preserve money, so some really
cool stuff and major advances in their fields to chemistry
and and all that. So the Institute of Egypt, though,
(06:47):
can't ever quite function like it's supposed to, which is
of course communicating with the French Institute back home. They
would share knowledge and be able to feed off of
each other. This doesn't happen, obviously, because after the French
defeat at Abacure Bay, the British can intercept all their messages,
so you don't have supplies anymore, but you also don't
(07:10):
have communication with France unless it's bad news. They would
they would send the lonely, sad letters about how how
they missed there. That's so embarrassing for the savants. Yeah,
they're they're sending letters back home to the institute and
to their families like why haven't we heard from you?
I really miss you so much. Egypt is not quite
(07:30):
what I hoped it would be. And the British intercept
these and publicize them and just sort of use them
to mock the Savants. There are some other setbacks. There's
this Cairo uprising where several of the scholars are killed
because their lovely institute palace is a mile away from
all the soldiers who it takes them quite a long
time to get there, so their work is is already
(07:52):
dangerous and hard, and then when Napoleon starts sending his
scholars on missions, it gets even harder. Yeah, so we
mentioned that thirty six of the men are just students.
Some of them are really really young in their in
their teens. And in late October they take their final,
which interestingly is around the same time they're they're fellow
(08:12):
students back at home. Um, they all pass and they
sort of achieve a more equal footing than they have.
But that's thirty six more guys that Napoleon consent on
his craziest mission because he doesn't just want these people
as cultural ambassadors. He wants them as engineers to scout
the land, to find the water, all of that the
(08:34):
really important stuff. Now it's time to pick what they
want to do, and they have the choice of joining
the military engineers or the core of bridges and roads,
and again you can imagine that would be a little disappointing.
You'd rather be on the core of pyramids perhaps, or
of mummies. The engineers are put to work at mapping
and hydrology because the main existing Egyptian map had seriously
(08:59):
been done by a guy from his chair, so he's
just existing drawing at Egypt piece things together. But this
job is dangerous. To go out and do all this mapping,
they require escorts. It's very hot. The Bedouins are on
the attack. Well, part of the issue is by this
point the French military has started a policy of seizing camels.
(09:22):
The Savants are nicer, they'll buy your camel from you.
But the French are getting a pretty bad reputation in
Egypt by this point, and the Savants are suffering because
of it. Their other main project is trying to see
if they could possibly build a canal at Sue as
is Canada done at all. So the danger of checking
(09:42):
calculations twice leads to some errors because it's difficult to
keep going out on these dangerous forays into the desert.
Plus they've lost their their modern tools. They're relying on
whatever they can. They're doing what they can. And it's
determined incorrectly that the Red Sea is higher than the Mediterranean.
So that is what happens when you can't matter twice. Yeah,
(10:03):
they don't want to flood Egypt with salt water, but
not everything is so terrible. Before we make this sound
like it sounds like the worst possible vacation ever, the
court does find the Rosetta stone in July near an
old Crusader fort. We may have we may have even
mentioned the fort in one of our Crusader podcasts, you know,
(10:24):
So the Rosetta Stone, Candice and Jane have already done
an episode on it. But of course it's the eventual
key to unlocking the language of the gods. Before it's
found and decoded, people didn't even know how old the
Egyptian civilization was. They didn't know who the gods were,
what the Egyptians did. Just imagine, it's heads in the desert,
(10:46):
buried in sand. It has no meaning attached to it.
So this discovery is something the soldiers and the savants
can all be happy about and share with France. You know,
they're they're big fabulous saying that they did. And the
commission member Conte makes some prince of the stone to
send back to Paris, and amazingly they make it through.
But it's their last contact for two years. So that's
(11:10):
some more doom for you. But time to backtrack a
little bit and and give you a little more information
about these cool antiquities and the ruins and the things
like that that people associate with this mission. So one
of our savants, who hasn't been to Cairo in the
past year, has instead been trailing the Mama Luke Murad
(11:31):
Bay all around Upper Egypt. So remember how after we
talked about the Battle of the Pyramids, Murad Bay head
south and trails this group of the French army behind
it for nine months, just leading them on a wild
goose chase essentially, Well, Dominique Vivon Denal decides to join
the general leading this mission in his pursuit of Murad Bay,
(11:53):
and he ends up getting the grand tour of Upper
Egypt before anyone else does. It sounds like a good
trip from the terrible danger, and well, yeah, because people
already knew what was in Alexandria. They knew about the
pyramids and the Sphinx, but they didn't really have a
good idea about all of the other things out there,
the temples, the Valley of the Kings. Donal gets to
(12:14):
fly through thebes Karnak and finally, because of course they're
chasing this, this rebel beg for fifteen minutes to draw
something and to say the general will say, okay, fifteen
minutes and then we gotta go. So he gets his
quick sketches, but that's about it, and his impressions of
ancient Egypt are the first thing that the people back
home see. So he starts off this craze for all
(12:37):
things Egypt. But when he runs into a group of
the young engineers who are out doing their hydrographic survey
in May, he shows them some of his sketches and
tells them about Dendara and it's zodiac and gives them
the idea, maybe if we could decode this zodiac, we
might figure out how old the ancient Egyptian civilization really is.
(13:00):
So these young engineers, they persuade their superiors to let
them spend more time surveying the temples. You know, we
finished our hydrology work, let us go draw these things.
And this is real drafting, not just sketching like Donald did.
And they spend the summer of doing it, and they
are systematic about it. They use a grid system, and
(13:24):
they risk falling into scary holes and running into bats.
And Dendara had actually been used as a storage bin,
essentially for freshly executed body. So it's a creepy place,
but it's still pretty cool, pretty cool. So meanwhile, Donal
has returned to Cairo and show Napoleon his sketches, and
(13:44):
Napoleon authorizes to Antiquities Commissions to venture into Upper Egypt.
When the commissions arrived in September sevent everyone gets to
work recording everything like real archaeologist would. This is kind
of where archaeology is started. They even form these human
chains to make sure they're they're going over every little
(14:05):
piece of ground, and of course they do have to
fend off that's while they're doing it. As we mentioned,
it's terrible. So this this project is the prize. It
is the best of the best for most of the
Golden Age for this mission, definitely, but um things. Things
don't really get that much better after this. In fact,
they get a lot worse because after authorizing the Antiquities Commission,
(14:29):
it's about the last thing Napoleon does in Egypt before
he leaves secretly, just like he came. And admittedly he
has had a very bad year since that naval disaster
at Abqure Bay. There was the Cairo Uprising, there was
a really bloody, very disturbing scene at Jaffa, and a
(14:50):
never ending failed siege at Occer against a guy named
the Butcher. So if that gives you a performidable enemy,
plus the plague, and the plague was so bad ad
on the battlefield that it's rumored Napoleon may have ordered
his own soldiers euthanized. He denies it, others say it happened.
Been having a moral debate about. Plus the news from
(15:13):
home isn't very good either, and like we said, the
British are letting the bad news get to Napoleon, just
not letting any normal exchange of letters get through. So
he finds out Frances at war with Austria again, and
the French forces have been kicked out of Germany and Italy,
and the directory clearly is not going to last much longer.
And Napoleon, a very ambitious man, obviously wants to be
(15:36):
in France for whatever happens next, and he takes three
of his savants with him, bertel Monge and Denands, and
Donald's early arrival at home allows him to publish his
Sketches of Upper Egypt, which becomes a best seller. And
while the French are happy that Napoleon's back, the Savants
are devastated that he's left. And he's left a general
(15:58):
in charge, General Jean bapt East Claiber, and he wants
to conclude the war, but he's gotten permission to keep
the savants as long as they're useful and he wants
to protect his legacy, so they're not going home anytime soon,
or at least not until they've finished their project as
best they canasically, not until everyone goes home. But Cleverer
(16:18):
makes very fast pros progress on getting the French out
of Egypt. Napoleon is saying, if things don't get better
within a year, you can start negotiating. Cleverer starts negotiating
within four months and he's ready to to work out
a surrender, and he ends up forming the Convention of
all a Reache with the Ottomans. It basically it means
(16:40):
the Turks will pay France's way home. France will get
to keep all their arms, but they'll get out of Egypt.
They'll get out of Cairo. Unfortunately, the British won't honor
this agreement that the French have made with the Turks,
but too bad for the French. The Turks still plan
on claiming Cairo in ten days, so they're getting their
(17:02):
side of the bargain, but they don't think I mean
the French are getting there. The French are are between
a rock and a hard place, and they have to
keep fighting the Turks instead of working out this agreement
where the Turks pay for them to go home. They
just keep on fighting. It seems like it will never end.
It does end for Cleber. He is stabbed by a
fanatic and that's a major loss for the Savants because
(17:25):
most of the military hasn't ever been to gung ho
about the scientists and about why they're there in the
first place. This is very avatar Sarah, Well, I mean,
imagine they're going out on these dangerous missions to collect
bugs and to collect birds and stuff like that. The
soldiers think the scientists might be hoarding treasure if it's
(17:48):
not just stuffed animals in their packages. But the new
guy in charge really really hates the Savants, and it shows.
He is General Jacques Francois Ladmanu, who has converted to Islam,
changed his name, and married an Egyptian wife. But most importantly,
he's a colonialist who thinks France can hold Egypt, and
(18:11):
of course we know this is impossible. In the fall
of eighteen hundred, the French army hasn't gotten pay, the
Arabs are revolting, there are Turkish French skirmishes all the time,
and the British are secretly preparing a land assault, which
I mean, come on, that'll that'll be the ins not
going to happen. So by the time the Turks advanced
on Cairo, the French are forced to surrender because they're
(18:33):
being hit by plague again. Our guys are stuck in Cairo.
They've they've been rounded up from all over Egypt. When
it seems like Kleiber was actually going to get them home,
they've been stuck in Cairo. They don't have their nice
mam Luke harem room digs anymore, and they're just in limbo.
So it's amazing that amid this chaos they keep on
(18:55):
holding institute meetings. And the final institute meeting is on
March twenties, second eighteen o one and Si Lair talks
about crocodiles and this is an unfortunate episode um in
this history. He's just giving a lecture about crocodiles. But
the British get their hands on the report and they
start doing cartoons and stuff like he was trying to
(19:17):
train the crocodiles, and you can actually see one of
the cartoons he's getting bitten by it. So embarrassing for
the French. Finally, the scholars are ordered to Alexandria, and
they risk sickness, death, and war to go and rescue
their papers before a vacuum amount of Cairo, which made
me think of the bombardment of Baltimore. And by this
(19:39):
point the French soldiers are more dangerous to the savants
than the English. Yeah, they're they're trying to steal their stuff.
I mean, they're really blaming them by this point, for
they think they're the reason why they are in Egypt
and why everything is so terrible, and they're trying to
steal the treasure they think the Savants have. And finally
(20:00):
the scholars get into Alexandria, it's under siege, there's no food. Amazingly,
some are still working under these conditions. Um Sant Hilaire
actually is coming up with his proto Darwinian ideas at
this point because he's I guess thinking so broadly by
this point that he's able to come up with these ideas.
(20:20):
And at this point, as Sarah said, Menu becomes our Savonarola.
During their last month in Egypt, he toys with the scholars.
He tells them they can't leave, and then okay, they
can leave if they leave everything with him, all of
their research um their maps and maybe if they promise
they won't speak a single word of that mission when
(20:41):
they go back to France. All he really wants is
the Rosetta Stone, and he's taken it already, so these
are just psychological game. Keeps it in his tent or something.
So in July eight one, the Savants finally board a ship.
You're you're thinking, at last, we're going back to France. No,
we have our college enough. They wait on the ship
(21:02):
for one month until finally sant Hilaire and others rode
ashore to beg Menu, please let us go home. Four
days after that meeting, the French ship lifts anchor Star
starts to sail off, and then they get two cannon
shots from a nearby English vessel, and two cannon shots
(21:22):
are a warning, stop, don't go any further or we'll
sink you. Then, to make things even worse, they get
word from Menu that he will sink their ship. Think
the French boat. If they don't go, damned if you do,
damned exactly. So, Fourier actually rose to the British to
(21:43):
plead to let them leave, and eventually the British persuade
Menu to let his own countrymen doc in Alexandria. Again,
that's that's so magnanimous, thank you ridiculous. But August thirty one,
Menu capitulates the Brits, of course, want all of the
good boo d from the collection, but Manu offers them
the whole thing. Yeah, he says, take every note, every
(22:07):
stuffed bird, whatever, every artifact. Yeah, half it all. And
the English are surprised by how good this work actually
looks when they examine it, and they're thinking, well, this
is a nice win for us, and decide maybe, since
some of these frenchmen spent so much time assembling these collections,
(22:28):
we could bring some of them back to England and
they could help us interpret them and manage the collections.
The French want no part of this. After all, they've
been away from home for years. They're ready to go
back to France. So the scholars approached Menu and they're
pleading for their collections. Like, please try to work out
some sort of agreement with the British, he writes, the
(22:50):
British the most snarky letter imaginable. So so pretend I'm
a new here. I have just been informed that several
among our collection makers wish to follow their seeds, minerals, birds, butterflies,
or reptiles wherever you choose to ship their crates. I
do not know if they wish to have themselves stuffed
for the purpose, but I can assure you that if
(23:11):
the idea should appeal to them, I shall not prevent it.
Out That's pretty harsh coming from your own general. So
the scholars think that the British want not just not
just that they want their collections, they want to steal
their knowledge, their ideas. Three of the naturalists go and
lay down an ultimatum, and that's that. Look, this is
(23:34):
this is basic work. These are notes, and only we
can interpret our own work. It's unfinished without our translations,
without our interpretations, it's not going to mean anything to you.
With a follow up that we would rather destroy it
than see you have it. And the official book that
is eventually published recounts Saint Hilaire's speech rather than allow
(23:57):
this iniquitous despolation and vandalist him, we will destroy our property.
We will disperse it in the Libyan sands, or we
will throw it into the sea. Then we will protest
in Europe and tell by what violence we were reduced
to destroy so many treasures, and the British back down,
as would I if I had received such a miss
of So by the end of September they start boarding
(24:20):
ships again, only this time it works out there. Finally
home by the end of eighteen oh one. So what
awaits them in France? Obviously a lot of these a
lot of these guys who went over as boys have
grown up. You're coming back to a different scientific scene.
And Napoleon has actually done quite well for himself. He's
(24:41):
a consul now, and in February eighteen o two he
authorizes the publication of a book which will collect all
the knowledge from the expedition. It takes them a while, though,
to actually get the whole book out, so it's not
completed until eighteen eight So a lot of them are
dead by the time time it's finished. And if you'd
like to imagine you're one of the first to get
(25:04):
that book. Um, what would These lucky one thousand first
edition subscribers have received twenty three enormous serial books bound
in brown paper. They had linen pages forty three inches
tall and eight hundred and thirty seven engravings, for which
Conte invented a special press. Yeah, you could um. It
(25:25):
took so much work to engrave the the cloudless Egyptian
skies that he invented a press where you could just
sub it in behind each picture well, and the bonus
was an Egyptian themed case to keep them in. That's
some marketing. I would definitely spring for the case. So
the maths were supposed to be printed first, just to
give people a bit of an orientation about Egypt, but
(25:48):
because they were considered state secrets, they came out last,
by which point they were pretty outdated. Pictures of the
flora and fauna are said to rival Audubon, and of
course the archaeological site, the drawings of of all these temples,
and to start this craze for Egyptian dress, Egyptian architecture
(26:08):
and artifact collecting. This is the very beginning of the
Rape of Egypt. But it's difficult, of course to keep
publishing after the restoration of the monarchy. They have to
scrub out Napoleon completely from these records, which you can't
do completely exactly because it was Napoleon's thing. So we
have a good quote from him. If I had not
(26:29):
become Commander in chief of the Army, I would have
launched myself into the study of the exact sciences, and
since I have always had success in my great undertakings,
I would have become a highly distinguished scientist. So those
are pretty tall claims. Good opinion of himself. But still
there's no denying that his decision to bring a troop
(26:50):
of savants to Egypt dramatically affected nineteenth century science as
well as nineteenth century art and culture. And I mentioned
this book in the last episode, but I relied pretty
heavily on Nina Burley's mirage for information about just the
savant's daily lives and the crocodile, you know, stuff like that.
And one of her points she made that I really
(27:12):
liked a lot was that the scientists came of age
during the Age of Reason, but they mature during the
Romantic era, and the book that they ultimately produced really
shows signs of both. It's got that those cold hard
observations and measurements and calculations combined with adventure and danger
and art and a little bit of the Gothic too.
(27:35):
So that's the final word from Nina Burley. But of
course we can't give you every tiny little detail we'd
like from the podcast so if you'd like to search
for how the Rosetta Stone works on our home page
at ww dot house stuff works dot com, you can
learn a little bit more about that. And that brings
us to listen to mail. So, since the t went
(28:00):
to Egypt because they wanted to mess up the British
route to India, we thought that we would do a
little Indian related listener mail. And this is from Stephen
and it's in regards to the taj Mahal episode. He said,
this morning, I was listening to your podcast about the
taj Mahal and you mentioned the legend of an intended
black taj Mall. According to the documentary, and according to
(28:23):
an article, scholars now believe that the black taj actually
refers to an octagonal pool that once existed in ruins
of black marble structures known as the matab Ba or
moonlight garden. This pool, when filled with water, would have
reflected the taj Mall, and that is what is believed
to be the Black taj Mamal. So pretty cool And
(28:44):
if you have any additions you'd like to tell the
listeners about our podcasts, you can email us at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on
Twitter if you'd like to follow us at Miston History,
and we have a face book fan page and the
article I'd mentioned before, how the Rosetta Stone Works, can
(29:05):
be found on our homepage at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be
sure to check out the stuff you missed in History
Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home
page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and I've been
sending Katie pictures of Egypt all week. I've sent her
(00:20):
a picture of an Ibis, an ancient temple, a mongoose,
and at one point I even got distracted and drew
a laser. Ibis in Microsoft Paint. Was a highlight of
my week and outlook. But usually distraction during podcast research
is not a good thing. In this case, I'm going
to cite the spirit of Napoleon savants, who themselves were
(00:43):
kings of embracing distraction. And we've already given you some
background on Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, the Battle of the Pyramids,
the devastating defeat at the Battle of abukir Bay. Things
get worse for France as the army has to face
a triple threat the Turks, the Brits and Lapeste or
the plague, and the result is a major military failure
(01:05):
and terrible violence and destruction in Egypt. Fortunately, this episode
is dedicated to the French expedition that did not fail.
It was an intellectual expedition that shaped the science of archaeology.
It launched Egyptomania, and it eventually unearthed the key to
the secret history of the Pharaohs, which will get to
(01:25):
pretty soon. So first you have to wonder why Napoleon
brought these savants with him, And there are a few
reasons why it pays to bring a cadre of intellectuals
along for the war. And to break it down simply,
we'll give you a four points here. One who knows
what Egypt will be like. The army will need men
who can survey, who can find water, and who can
(01:47):
make maps, men who can observe and invent and manufacture
on the fly exactly. And they'll also need men who
are diplomatic and the perfect ambassadors of French culture and
democracy to a conquered land. And and what a conquered
land it is. The savants will help record and make
sense of what they see in Egypt and as stuff
(02:09):
the louver and build very impressive natural history collections and
bring Egypt back to France. And finally, perhaps most importantly,
they'll make Napoleon look good. It sounds like something his
hero Alexander the Great would do, and plus Napoleon, We've
got to give him credit for this. He really likes science.
He's this sort of honorary member of the French Institute,
(02:31):
but he takes it really seriously. He signs, he signs
himself for his letters as a member of the French Institute.
He loves science. So as Napoleon plans his secret mission
to Egypt, he authorizes three men to create his Commission
of Sciences and Arts, and they are Gasparmane who's a
very good at math, Claude Luis Bertela who's a chemist,
(02:53):
and Joseph Fourier, another mathematician, and those that round up
his little crew of savants. The commission's total comes to
one and fifty one, and some are well established in
their fields, but many are fresh out of school. Thirty
six of them are students. Their median age is twenty
five and bum bum bum, thirty one will die. We're
(03:14):
just saying this because these guys do not know what
they're getting into. But because they're going with Napoleon, they
think it's going to be really great. It's not, well,
you know, subject opinion, maybe if you're not one of
the so they probably get a taste of just how
adventurous this expedition is going to be. On the boat
ride from France, the established scientists birthed with officers and
(03:38):
attended salons on Napoleon's own flagships, having these very heavy
discussions what did dreams mean? What is the ideal form
of government? But these students are with the lowest of
the soldiers and sailors. They're seasick for getting their blankets stolen.
I have to imagine them just getting punched in the
salt the shoulder, hey point dexter givving a pillow exactly.
(04:01):
So they're not having the best trip, but I guess
they're still excited. And the four hundred ship flotilla finally
arrives in Alexandria on July one, and we've in our
earlier episode we we already know what happens to most
of the army and the navy from here. Fortunately for
the savants, most of them are spared that grueling desert
(04:22):
march and the Battle of the Pyramids. They stay in
Alexandria and Rosetta, which is even nicer than Alexandria, until
Napoleon secures Cairo. They get to travel by boat instead
of foot across the desert. They do have that one
devastating event though, the ship that held nearly all of
their equipment sank, So that's kind of a big deal
(04:43):
and planning. Yeah, So after the Battle of the Pyramids
and the flight of the Mama Luke leader Murad Bay,
Napoleon secures Cairo. We've we've covered this part. But with
the city in his pocket, Napoleon decides that he wants
to form a something like the French National Institute, a
(05:03):
collection of all these learned men where they can meet,
they can pitch their furies and their ideas and discuss
have have intellectual conversations. It's an official club that will
also conveniently tackle some of his mispressing questions. So Mombert
Lay scout the city for suitable quarters, because this building
(05:23):
has got to be huge. It's going to hold labs,
a museum, a library and observatory, a printing press, a zoo,
everything the savants will need. Sarah really wants to go,
and they find a complex of recently vacated mam Luke
palaces that will do the trick. I'm picturing it like
apartment shopping, but for rent. Yeah, walking into a mam
(05:44):
let probably a little class instead of my midtown apartment.
So their first meeting is in late August, and it's
held in the Harem Room, which I imagine is not
like our conference room. Apparently it's sort of the quiet
nicest room in the in these old buildings, so I
guess it makes sense to to set up shop there.
(06:04):
But Napoleon starts them off with really practical projects like
how can we make better ovens, how can we treat
the Nile water? How can we make beer without hops?
And you know they are they are practical questions, and
the savants do get to work on them, but soon
they're they're more interested in all of the amazing new
(06:25):
things they're seeing in Egypt for the first time gets
into studying mirages. The naturalist Etienne Jafoi sant hlaire Um
gets into these proto Darwinian theories, and Bartel starts studying
the natron that's used to preserve money, so some really
cool stuff and major advances in their fields to chemistry
and and all that. So the Institute of Egypt, though,
(06:47):
can't ever quite function like it's supposed to, which is
of course communicating with the French Institute back home. They
would share knowledge and be able to feed off of
each other. This doesn't happen, obviously, because after the French
defeat at Abacure Bay, the British can intercept all their messages,
so you don't have supplies anymore, but you also don't
(07:10):
have communication with France unless it's bad news. They would
they would send the lonely, sad letters about how how
they missed there. That's so embarrassing for the savants. Yeah,
they're they're sending letters back home to the institute and
to their families like why haven't we heard from you?
I really miss you so much. Egypt is not quite
(07:30):
what I hoped it would be. And the British intercept
these and publicize them and just sort of use them
to mock the Savants. There are some other setbacks. There's
this Cairo uprising where several of the scholars are killed
because their lovely institute palace is a mile away from
all the soldiers who it takes them quite a long
time to get there, so their work is is already
(07:52):
dangerous and hard, and then when Napoleon starts sending his
scholars on missions, it gets even harder. Yeah, so we
mentioned that thirty six of the men are just students.
Some of them are really really young in their in
their teens. And in late October they take their final,
which interestingly is around the same time they're they're fellow
(08:12):
students back at home. Um, they all pass and they
sort of achieve a more equal footing than they have.
But that's thirty six more guys that Napoleon consent on
his craziest mission because he doesn't just want these people
as cultural ambassadors. He wants them as engineers to scout
the land, to find the water, all of that the
(08:34):
really important stuff. Now it's time to pick what they
want to do, and they have the choice of joining
the military engineers or the core of bridges and roads,
and again you can imagine that would be a little disappointing.
You'd rather be on the core of pyramids perhaps, or
of mummies. The engineers are put to work at mapping
and hydrology because the main existing Egyptian map had seriously
(08:59):
been done by a guy from his chair, so he's
just existing drawing at Egypt piece things together. But this
job is dangerous. To go out and do all this mapping,
they require escorts. It's very hot. The Bedouins are on
the attack. Well, part of the issue is by this
point the French military has started a policy of seizing camels.
(09:22):
The Savants are nicer, they'll buy your camel from you.
But the French are getting a pretty bad reputation in
Egypt by this point, and the Savants are suffering because
of it. Their other main project is trying to see
if they could possibly build a canal at Sue as
is Canada done at all. So the danger of checking
(09:42):
calculations twice leads to some errors because it's difficult to
keep going out on these dangerous forays into the desert.
Plus they've lost their their modern tools. They're relying on
whatever they can. They're doing what they can. And it's
determined incorrectly that the Red Sea is higher than the Mediterranean.
So that is what happens when you can't matter twice. Yeah,
(10:03):
they don't want to flood Egypt with salt water, but
not everything is so terrible. Before we make this sound
like it sounds like the worst possible vacation ever, the
court does find the Rosetta stone in July near an
old Crusader fort. We may have we may have even
mentioned the fort in one of our Crusader podcasts, you know,
(10:24):
So the Rosetta Stone, Candice and Jane have already done
an episode on it. But of course it's the eventual
key to unlocking the language of the gods. Before it's
found and decoded, people didn't even know how old the
Egyptian civilization was. They didn't know who the gods were,
what the Egyptians did. Just imagine, it's heads in the desert,
(10:46):
buried in sand. It has no meaning attached to it.
So this discovery is something the soldiers and the savants
can all be happy about and share with France. You know,
they're they're big fabulous saying that they did. And the
commission member Conte makes some prince of the stone to
send back to Paris, and amazingly they make it through.
But it's their last contact for two years. So that's
(11:10):
some more doom for you. But time to backtrack a
little bit and and give you a little more information
about these cool antiquities and the ruins and the things
like that that people associate with this mission. So one
of our savants, who hasn't been to Cairo in the
past year, has instead been trailing the Mama Luke Murad
(11:31):
Bay all around Upper Egypt. So remember how after we
talked about the Battle of the Pyramids, Murad Bay head
south and trails this group of the French army behind
it for nine months, just leading them on a wild
goose chase essentially, Well, Dominique Vivon Denal decides to join
the general leading this mission in his pursuit of Murad Bay,
(11:53):
and he ends up getting the grand tour of Upper
Egypt before anyone else does. It sounds like a good
trip from the terrible danger, and well, yeah, because people
already knew what was in Alexandria. They knew about the
pyramids and the Sphinx, but they didn't really have a
good idea about all of the other things out there,
the temples, the Valley of the Kings. Donal gets to
(12:14):
fly through thebes Karnak and finally, because of course they're
chasing this, this rebel beg for fifteen minutes to draw
something and to say the general will say, okay, fifteen
minutes and then we gotta go. So he gets his
quick sketches, but that's about it, and his impressions of
ancient Egypt are the first thing that the people back
home see. So he starts off this craze for all
(12:37):
things Egypt. But when he runs into a group of
the young engineers who are out doing their hydrographic survey
in May, he shows them some of his sketches and
tells them about Dendara and it's zodiac and gives them
the idea, maybe if we could decode this zodiac, we
might figure out how old the ancient Egyptian civilization really is.
(13:00):
So these young engineers, they persuade their superiors to let
them spend more time surveying the temples. You know, we
finished our hydrology work, let us go draw these things.
And this is real drafting, not just sketching like Donald did.
And they spend the summer of doing it, and they
are systematic about it. They use a grid system, and
(13:24):
they risk falling into scary holes and running into bats.
And Dendara had actually been used as a storage bin,
essentially for freshly executed body. So it's a creepy place,
but it's still pretty cool, pretty cool. So meanwhile, Donal
has returned to Cairo and show Napoleon his sketches, and
(13:44):
Napoleon authorizes to Antiquities Commissions to venture into Upper Egypt.
When the commissions arrived in September sevent everyone gets to
work recording everything like real archaeologist would. This is kind
of where archaeology is started. They even form these human
chains to make sure they're they're going over every little
(14:05):
piece of ground, and of course they do have to
fend off that's while they're doing it. As we mentioned,
it's terrible. So this this project is the prize. It
is the best of the best for most of the
Golden Age for this mission, definitely, but um things. Things
don't really get that much better after this. In fact,
they get a lot worse because after authorizing the Antiquities Commission,
(14:29):
it's about the last thing Napoleon does in Egypt before
he leaves secretly, just like he came. And admittedly he
has had a very bad year since that naval disaster
at Abqure Bay. There was the Cairo Uprising, there was
a really bloody, very disturbing scene at Jaffa, and a
(14:50):
never ending failed siege at Occer against a guy named
the Butcher. So if that gives you a performidable enemy,
plus the plague, and the plague was so bad ad
on the battlefield that it's rumored Napoleon may have ordered
his own soldiers euthanized. He denies it, others say it happened.
Been having a moral debate about. Plus the news from
(15:13):
home isn't very good either, and like we said, the
British are letting the bad news get to Napoleon, just
not letting any normal exchange of letters get through. So
he finds out Frances at war with Austria again, and
the French forces have been kicked out of Germany and Italy,
and the directory clearly is not going to last much longer.
And Napoleon, a very ambitious man, obviously wants to be
(15:36):
in France for whatever happens next, and he takes three
of his savants with him, bertel Monge and Denands, and
Donald's early arrival at home allows him to publish his
Sketches of Upper Egypt, which becomes a best seller. And
while the French are happy that Napoleon's back, the Savants
are devastated that he's left. And he's left a general
(15:58):
in charge, General Jean bapt East Claiber, and he wants
to conclude the war, but he's gotten permission to keep
the savants as long as they're useful and he wants
to protect his legacy, so they're not going home anytime soon,
or at least not until they've finished their project as
best they canasically, not until everyone goes home. But Cleverer
(16:18):
makes very fast pros progress on getting the French out
of Egypt. Napoleon is saying, if things don't get better
within a year, you can start negotiating. Cleverer starts negotiating
within four months and he's ready to to work out
a surrender, and he ends up forming the Convention of
all a Reache with the Ottomans. It basically it means
(16:40):
the Turks will pay France's way home. France will get
to keep all their arms, but they'll get out of Egypt.
They'll get out of Cairo. Unfortunately, the British won't honor
this agreement that the French have made with the Turks,
but too bad for the French. The Turks still plan
on claiming Cairo in ten days, so they're getting their
(17:02):
side of the bargain, but they don't think I mean
the French are getting there. The French are are between
a rock and a hard place, and they have to
keep fighting the Turks instead of working out this agreement
where the Turks pay for them to go home. They
just keep on fighting. It seems like it will never end.
It does end for Cleber. He is stabbed by a
fanatic and that's a major loss for the Savants because
(17:25):
most of the military hasn't ever been to gung ho
about the scientists and about why they're there in the
first place. This is very avatar Sarah, Well, I mean,
imagine they're going out on these dangerous missions to collect
bugs and to collect birds and stuff like that. The
soldiers think the scientists might be hoarding treasure if it's
(17:48):
not just stuffed animals in their packages. But the new
guy in charge really really hates the Savants, and it shows.
He is General Jacques Francois Ladmanu, who has converted to Islam,
changed his name, and married an Egyptian wife. But most importantly,
he's a colonialist who thinks France can hold Egypt, and
(18:11):
of course we know this is impossible. In the fall
of eighteen hundred, the French army hasn't gotten pay, the
Arabs are revolting, there are Turkish French skirmishes all the time,
and the British are secretly preparing a land assault, which
I mean, come on, that'll that'll be the ins not
going to happen. So by the time the Turks advanced
on Cairo, the French are forced to surrender because they're
(18:33):
being hit by plague again. Our guys are stuck in Cairo.
They've they've been rounded up from all over Egypt. When
it seems like Kleiber was actually going to get them home,
they've been stuck in Cairo. They don't have their nice
mam Luke harem room digs anymore, and they're just in limbo.
So it's amazing that amid this chaos they keep on
(18:55):
holding institute meetings. And the final institute meeting is on
March twenties, second eighteen o one and Si Lair talks
about crocodiles and this is an unfortunate episode um in
this history. He's just giving a lecture about crocodiles. But
the British get their hands on the report and they
start doing cartoons and stuff like he was trying to
(19:17):
train the crocodiles, and you can actually see one of
the cartoons he's getting bitten by it. So embarrassing for
the French. Finally, the scholars are ordered to Alexandria, and
they risk sickness, death, and war to go and rescue
their papers before a vacuum amount of Cairo, which made
me think of the bombardment of Baltimore. And by this
(19:39):
point the French soldiers are more dangerous to the savants
than the English. Yeah, they're they're trying to steal their stuff.
I mean, they're really blaming them by this point, for
they think they're the reason why they are in Egypt
and why everything is so terrible, and they're trying to
steal the treasure they think the Savants have. And finally
(20:00):
the scholars get into Alexandria, it's under siege, there's no food. Amazingly,
some are still working under these conditions. Um Sant Hilaire
actually is coming up with his proto Darwinian ideas at
this point because he's I guess thinking so broadly by
this point that he's able to come up with these ideas.
(20:20):
And at this point, as Sarah said, Menu becomes our Savonarola.
During their last month in Egypt, he toys with the scholars.
He tells them they can't leave, and then okay, they
can leave if they leave everything with him, all of
their research um their maps and maybe if they promise
they won't speak a single word of that mission when
(20:41):
they go back to France. All he really wants is
the Rosetta Stone, and he's taken it already, so these
are just psychological game. Keeps it in his tent or something.
So in July eight one, the Savants finally board a ship.
You're you're thinking, at last, we're going back to France. No,
we have our college enough. They wait on the ship
(21:02):
for one month until finally sant Hilaire and others rode
ashore to beg Menu, please let us go home. Four
days after that meeting, the French ship lifts anchor Star
starts to sail off, and then they get two cannon
shots from a nearby English vessel, and two cannon shots
(21:22):
are a warning, stop, don't go any further or we'll
sink you. Then, to make things even worse, they get
word from Menu that he will sink their ship. Think
the French boat. If they don't go, damned if you do,
damned exactly. So, Fourier actually rose to the British to
(21:43):
plead to let them leave, and eventually the British persuade
Menu to let his own countrymen doc in Alexandria. Again,
that's that's so magnanimous, thank you ridiculous. But August thirty one,
Menu capitulates the Brits, of course, want all of the
good boo d from the collection, but Manu offers them
the whole thing. Yeah, he says, take every note, every
(22:07):
stuffed bird, whatever, every artifact. Yeah, half it all. And
the English are surprised by how good this work actually
looks when they examine it, and they're thinking, well, this
is a nice win for us, and decide maybe, since
some of these frenchmen spent so much time assembling these collections,
(22:28):
we could bring some of them back to England and
they could help us interpret them and manage the collections.
The French want no part of this. After all, they've
been away from home for years. They're ready to go
back to France. So the scholars approached Menu and they're
pleading for their collections. Like, please try to work out
some sort of agreement with the British, he writes, the
(22:50):
British the most snarky letter imaginable. So so pretend I'm
a new here. I have just been informed that several
among our collection makers wish to follow their seeds, minerals, birds, butterflies,
or reptiles wherever you choose to ship their crates. I
do not know if they wish to have themselves stuffed
for the purpose, but I can assure you that if
(23:11):
the idea should appeal to them, I shall not prevent it.
Out That's pretty harsh coming from your own general. So
the scholars think that the British want not just not
just that they want their collections, they want to steal
their knowledge, their ideas. Three of the naturalists go and
lay down an ultimatum, and that's that. Look, this is
(23:34):
this is basic work. These are notes, and only we
can interpret our own work. It's unfinished without our translations,
without our interpretations, it's not going to mean anything to you.
With a follow up that we would rather destroy it
than see you have it. And the official book that
is eventually published recounts Saint Hilaire's speech rather than allow
(23:57):
this iniquitous despolation and vandalist him, we will destroy our property.
We will disperse it in the Libyan sands, or we
will throw it into the sea. Then we will protest
in Europe and tell by what violence we were reduced
to destroy so many treasures, and the British back down,
as would I if I had received such a miss
of So by the end of September they start boarding
(24:20):
ships again, only this time it works out there. Finally
home by the end of eighteen oh one. So what
awaits them in France? Obviously a lot of these a
lot of these guys who went over as boys have
grown up. You're coming back to a different scientific scene.
And Napoleon has actually done quite well for himself. He's
(24:41):
a consul now, and in February eighteen o two he
authorizes the publication of a book which will collect all
the knowledge from the expedition. It takes them a while, though,
to actually get the whole book out, so it's not
completed until eighteen eight So a lot of them are
dead by the time time it's finished. And if you'd
like to imagine you're one of the first to get
(25:04):
that book. Um, what would These lucky one thousand first
edition subscribers have received twenty three enormous serial books bound
in brown paper. They had linen pages forty three inches
tall and eight hundred and thirty seven engravings, for which
Conte invented a special press. Yeah, you could um. It
(25:25):
took so much work to engrave the the cloudless Egyptian
skies that he invented a press where you could just
sub it in behind each picture well, and the bonus
was an Egyptian themed case to keep them in. That's
some marketing. I would definitely spring for the case. So
the maths were supposed to be printed first, just to
give people a bit of an orientation about Egypt, but
(25:48):
because they were considered state secrets, they came out last,
by which point they were pretty outdated. Pictures of the
flora and fauna are said to rival Audubon, and of
course the archaeological site, the drawings of of all these temples,
and to start this craze for Egyptian dress, Egyptian architecture
(26:08):
and artifact collecting. This is the very beginning of the
Rape of Egypt. But it's difficult, of course to keep
publishing after the restoration of the monarchy. They have to
scrub out Napoleon completely from these records, which you can't
do completely exactly because it was Napoleon's thing. So we
have a good quote from him. If I had not
(26:29):
become Commander in chief of the Army, I would have
launched myself into the study of the exact sciences, and
since I have always had success in my great undertakings,
I would have become a highly distinguished scientist. So those
are pretty tall claims. Good opinion of himself. But still
there's no denying that his decision to bring a troop
(26:50):
of savants to Egypt dramatically affected nineteenth century science as
well as nineteenth century art and culture. And I mentioned
this book in the last episode, but I relied pretty
heavily on Nina Burley's mirage for information about just the
savant's daily lives and the crocodile, you know, stuff like that.
And one of her points she made that I really
(27:12):
liked a lot was that the scientists came of age
during the Age of Reason, but they mature during the
Romantic era, and the book that they ultimately produced really
shows signs of both. It's got that those cold hard
observations and measurements and calculations combined with adventure and danger
and art and a little bit of the Gothic too.
(27:35):
So that's the final word from Nina Burley. But of
course we can't give you every tiny little detail we'd
like from the podcast so if you'd like to search
for how the Rosetta Stone works on our home page
at ww dot house stuff works dot com, you can
learn a little bit more about that. And that brings
us to listen to mail. So, since the t went
(28:00):
to Egypt because they wanted to mess up the British
route to India, we thought that we would do a
little Indian related listener mail. And this is from Stephen
and it's in regards to the taj Mahal episode. He said,
this morning, I was listening to your podcast about the
taj Mahal and you mentioned the legend of an intended
black taj Mall. According to the documentary, and according to
(28:23):
an article, scholars now believe that the black taj actually
refers to an octagonal pool that once existed in ruins
of black marble structures known as the matab Ba or
moonlight garden. This pool, when filled with water, would have
reflected the taj Mall, and that is what is believed
to be the Black taj Mamal. So pretty cool And
(28:44):
if you have any additions you'd like to tell the
listeners about our podcasts, you can email us at History
Podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on
Twitter if you'd like to follow us at Miston History,
and we have a face book fan page and the
article I'd mentioned before, how the Rosetta Stone Works, can
(29:05):
be found on our homepage at www dot how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be
sure to check out the stuff you missed in History
Class blog on the how stuff works dot com home
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