Knowledge and Power

Aida is an opera about ancient Egypt written by an Italian composer, but it might be most accurate to describe the work as French. The basic story of the opera was pitched to Verdi by impresario Camille du Locle, director of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, who collaborated on the scenario with Auguste Mariette, a French archeologist who went on to become the founder of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. But even beyond these immediate sources of French influence, arguably the entire project of studying—and mythologizing—the history and culture of ancient Egypt was inaugurated by France’s most infamous emperor.

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte launched a secret invasion of Egypt. He hoped, on the one hand, to add the region to his growing empire and exert French influence in the Middle East. On the other, he also aimed to impede—and possibly attack—British trade routes to India. When Bonaparte’s forces landed in Egypt, they included not only soldiers but also an impressive squadron of scholars dubbed “savants.” These architects, engineers, printers, sculptors, botanists, doctors, writers, painters, interpreters, mechanics, and sundry other experts were tasked with documenting Egyptian history in exhaustive detail. The result was the mammoth Description de l’Égypte (The Description of Egypt), published in nine volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates, or images, between 1809 and 1822. The second edition of the Description, published between 1821 and 1828, expanded to 26 volumes.

 This vast scholarly undertaking was an intellectual enterprise, but it was also a political one. For Napoleon and his savants, producing knowledge about Egypt—and making that knowledge available to French readers for the first time—was a key strategy for asserting power over the country. Indeed, rendering a foreign culture knowable was another way to make it conquerable. And although Napoleon was ultimately thwarted in his attempts to colonize Egypt by British and Ottoman forces, the legacies of French incursion into the region remained.

Following the failed Egyptian campaign, French and other European scholars and intellectuals continued to be fascinated by the history and culture of ancient Egypt, leading to an uptick in so-called “Egyptomania.” In 1822, the French philologist Jean-François Champollion became the first to decipher the Rosetta Stone, an artifact containing inscriptions in Ancient Greek and Egyptian, a watershed in the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone was initially claimed by Napoleon’s forces after its discovery in 1799 but was later surrendered to the British in 1801.

Just a few years later, Champollion and the Italian scholar Ippolito Rosellini conducted research in Egypt, their findings published in Monuments de l’Égypte et Nubie (Monuments of Egypt and Nubia). Around the same time, the Prussian Karl Richard Lepsius and Englishman Sir John Gardner Wilkinson led their own expeditions. The advent of photography only made ancient artifacts, inscriptions, and monuments even more accessible to a Western reading public. Journalist Maxime Du Camp’s Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie (Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, and Syria) from 1852 included 125 photographs of these locations, many—like the maps, drawings, and surveys in the Description de l’Égypte—totally devoid of people, thereby portraying the Middle East as empty and ready for the taking.

Auguste Mariette, who helped craft the story of Aida, built his career on the foundations of early French Egyptology. A member of the Egyptian department of the Musée de Louvre starting in 1849, Mariette traveled to Egypt and made several major archeological breakthroughs, ultimately uncovering the Serapeum and Avenue of the Sphinxes in Saqqara. Though he was an expert Egyptologist—Mariette also oversaw the design of the sets and costumes for the original production of Aida in Cairo—there is no evidence that his ideas came from anywhere but his own imagination, derived from his general sense of an “ancient Egyptian” aesthetic based on archeological finds from several centuries and dozens of dynasties. There are also deliberate historical inaccuracies in the opera: For instance, Egyptologists in Mariette’s day knew that only male priests, never priestesses, presided in Egyptian temples. Aida thus provides much less insight into the worlds of ancient Egypt than it does the desires, misconceptions, and anxieties of Europeans seeking to understand distant cultures.