The Scope of Orientalism 83 Vainqueur, enthousiaste, éclatant de prestiges, Prodige, il étonna la terre des prodiges. Les vieux scheiks vénéraient I‘émir jeune et prudent; Le peuple redoutait ses armes inouies; Sublime, il apparut aux tribus éblouies Comme un Mahomet d’occident.” (By the Nile, I find him once again. Egypt shines with the fires of his dawn; His imperial orb rises in the Orient. Victor, enthusiast, bursting with achievements, Prodigious, he stunned the land of prodigies. The old sheikhs venerated the young and prudent emir. The people dreaded his unprecedented arins; Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes Like a Mahomet of the Occident.) Such a triumph could only have been prepared before a military expedition, perhaps only by someone who had no prior experience of the Orient except what books and scholars told him. The idea of taking along a full-scale academy is very much an aspect of this textual attitude to the Orient. And this attitude in tum was bolstered by specific Revolutionary decrees (particularly the one of 10 Genninal An III—March 30, 1793---establishing an école publique in the Bibliothéque nationale to teach Arabic, Turkish, and Persian)‘ whose object was the rationalist one of dispelling mystery and institutionalizing even the most recondite knowledge. Thus many of Napoleon’s Orientalist translators were students of Sylvestre de Sacy, who, beginning in June 1796, was the first and only teacher of Arabic at the Ecole publique des langues orientales. Sacy later became the teacher of nearly every major Orientalist in Europe, where his students dominated the field for about threequarters of a century. Many of them were politically useful, in the ways that several had been to Napoleon in Egypt. But dealings with the Muslims were only a part of Napoleon's project to dominate Egypt. The other part was to render it completely open, to make it totally accessible to European scrutiny. From being a land of obscurity and a part of the Orient hitherto known at second hand through the exploits of earlier travelers, scholars, and conquerors, Egypt was to become a department of French learning. Here too the textual and schematic attitudes are evident, The Institut, with its teams of chemists, historians, biol 

84 ORIENTALISM ogists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians, was the learned division of the army. Its job was no less aggressive: to put Egypt into modern French; and unlike the Abbé Le Mascrier’s 1735 Description de TEgypte, Napoleon's was to be a universal undertaking. Almost from the first moments of the occupation Napoleon saw to it that the Institut began its meetings, its experiments— its fact-finding mission, as we would call it today. Most important, everything said, seen, and studied was to be recorded, and indeed was recorded in that great collective appropriation of one county by another, the Description de Egypte, published in twenty-three enormous yolumes between 1809 and 1828. The Description’s uniqueness is not only in its size, or even in the intelligence of its contributors, but in its attitude to its subject matter, and it is this attitude that makes it of great interest for the study of modern Orientalist projects. The first few pages of its préface historique, written by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, the Institut’s secretary, make it clear that in “doing” Egypt the scholars were also grappling directly with a kind of unadulterated cultural, geographical, and historical significance. Egypt was the focal point of the relationships between Africa and Asia, between Europe and the East, between memory and actuality. Placed between Africa and Asia, and communicating easily with Europe, Egypt occupies the center of the ancient continent. This country presents only great memories; it is the homeland of the arts and conserves innumerable monuments; its principal temples and the palaces inhabited by its kings still exist, even though its least ancient edifices had already been built by the time of the Trojan War. Homer, Lycurgus, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato all went to Egypt to study the sciences, religion, and the laws. Alexander founded an opulent city there, which for a long time enjoyed commercial supremacy and which witnessed Pompey, Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus deciding between them the fate of Rome and that of the entire world. It is therefore proper for this country to attract the attention of illustrious princes who rule the destiny of nations. No considerable power was ever amassed by any nation, whether in the West or in Asia, that did not also turn that nation toward Egypt, which was regarded in some measure as its natural lot.” Because Egypt was saturated with meaning for the arts, sciences, and government, its role was to be the stage on which actions of a