Description de l’Egypte, which is a set of volumes containing an exhaustive description of ancient and modern Egypt (modern at the time of authoring, that is) that was prepared by scientists accompanying Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798, is now available in an online version, courtesy of Bibliotheca Alexandrina and The International School of Information Sciences with morphological full text search at http://descegy.bibalex.org
That’s over 9000 pages documenting all aspects of Egyptian history, antiquities, state, geography, and culture of the period. Pretty cool huh? Its all in French of course, and the last time I tried reading any French was in high school (i.e. my French sucks) but it is still cool to just browse it and look at the drawings. I am into that stuff. Check those out:
2 Responses to Description de l’Egypte now online
embee
April 17th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I’m not french-friendly either. But it’s very neat to see a website with an “Egyptian” theme that didn’t turn out to be tacky. Love the included pictures. The patience the people had to record ALL of that in writing is mesmerizing !!
Mike
May 1st, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Cool site. I was just reading about it in Edward Said’s “Orientalism.” But while waiting to post this I was reading your Dubai airport experience. This comment page popped up just as the guy was putting on the rubber gloves. Gotta go!!