The Zodiac of Paris

How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science

Jed Z. Buchwald, Diane Greco Josefowicz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780691145761
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400834563
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

The clash of faith and science in Napoleonic France

The Dendera zodiac—an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with mysterious symbols of the stars and planets—was first discovered by the French during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, and quickly provoked a controversy between scientists and theologians. Brought to Paris in 1821 and ultimately installed in the Louvre, where it can still be seen today, the zodiac appeared to depict the nighttime sky from a time predating the Biblical creation, and therefore cast doubt on religious truth. The Zodiac of Paris tells the story of this incredible archeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France.

The book unfolds against the turbulence of the French Revolution, Napoleon's breathtaking rise and fall, and the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. Drawing on newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence, Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz show how scientists and intellectuals seized upon the zodiac to discredit Christianity, and how this drew furious responses from conservatives and sparked debates about the merits of scientific calculation as a source of knowledge about the past. The ideological battles would rage until the thoroughly antireligious Jean-François Champollion unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs—and of the zodiac itself. Champollion would prove the religious reactionaries right, but for all the wrong reasons.

The Zodiac of Paris brings Napoleonic and Restoration France vividly to life, revealing the lengths to which scientists, intellectuals, theologians, and conservatives went to use the ancient past for modern purposes.

1

All This for Two Stones?

On October 1, 1820, an engineer named Jean Lelorrain left Marseilles for Alexandria on a ship under heavy sail, laden with saws, chisels, jacks, and a sledge with wooden rollers made especially for transporting a large object over rough terrain. Lelorrain had been commissioned to remove an immense circular zodiac from the ceiling of an ancient temple near the village of Dendera on the west bank of the Nile. The zodiac, one of only four still extant, had excited tremendous interest and controversy when it had been discovered during Napoleon’s Egypt expedition two decades before. Lelorrain’s employer, an antiquities speculator named Sebastian Saulnier, hoped to ensure a good return on his investment by resurrecting the ceiling, now all but forgotten, as a particular cause celébre: a fresh symbol of French national glory, then in dire need of a boost.

Saulnier was born in Nancy on February 28, 1790, the son of Pierre Dieudonné Louis Saulnier, a deputy of the Chamber and secretary general of Napoleon’s Ministry of Police in 1810 under its inquisitorial minister, Anne Marie Savary, the duc de Rovigo. The younger Saulnier, due no doubt to his father’s influence, had been police commissioner in Lyons, and then, during Napoleon’s hundred-day return from exile in Elba, prefect in Tarn-et-Garonne and the Aude, both in southern France. Stripped of his official responsibilities during the Restoration, he turned his hand to literary and scientific matters, publishing fourteen volumes of the Bibliothèque historique before shuttering the enterprise in April 1820, as well as the somewhat longer-lived and more widely read Minerve française, a journal of current events and opinion.¹ Saulnier was well connected in Egypt, having befriended Youssef Boghos Bey, the Egyptian pasha’s closest adviser, a canny polyglot who effectively controlled the issuance of firmans, or permissions for excavation, throughout Egypt (and who reportedly received one-thirtieth the value of each item exported).²

As a publisher Saulnier knew how to influence public opinion. To coincide with the zodiac’s Parisian debut, he produced a book promoting the ceiling as an archeological artifact comparable in importance to the Rosetta Stone. With its inscriptions in the undeciphered hieroglyphs, in demotic,³ and in Greek, the Rosetta Stone was among the greatest trophies seized by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign—which made its loss, after Napoleon’s defeat by the British navy at Aboukir, a profound humiliation. The British poured salt into the wound by inscribing the captured antiquities with jibes against the defeated French.⁴ While acquainting his readers with the Dendera ceiling as a singular archeological find, Saulnier fanned the flames of French resentment, accusing the British of the grossest philistinism in their careless treatment of the magnificent remnants of Egyptian civilization.⁵

Figure 1.1. Dendera today and as photographed by Francis Frith circa 1863

Saulnier’s assertion of the zodiac’s centrality to French national pride rested on a single breathtaking assumption: that the zodiac, like the lost Rosetta Stone, was French property in the first place. Saulnier described the zodiac as a treasured reminder of one of the most glorious episodes in French military history, General Desaix’s rout of the Mamelukes in the Thebaid, the ancient desert region of Egypt that stretches from Abydos to Aswan. It was during this campaign, Saulnier pointed out, that Napoleon’s troops first entered the temple at Dendera, where they found a chamber whose ceiling was adorned with what appeared to them to be an intricately carved depiction of the heavens.⁶ The ceiling was sketched for the first time by Vivant Denon, one of the artists on Napoleon’s expedition.⁷ Denon’s sketch (Figure 4.3), Saulnier averred, had brought the zodiac to the world’s attention, a fact that he adduced as further evidence to support his claim for French ownership. For Saulnier, to discover, describe, publish, and promote something was to own it.

Saulnier’s advertisement of the zodiac as a symbol of the lost glories of France’s recent past connected the mysterious object to popular resentment against the British. As Saulnier well knew, the value of the zodiac—a matter about which he, the excavation’s financier, was decidedly not neutral—would naturally rise along with French pride at its having been snatched from the English captors of the Rosetta Stone. But there was more to Saulnier’s position than mere nationalism. Rather, Saulnier’s proprietary attitude was typical of a view of Egypt and its antiquities common to cultured Europeans of the period. The astonishing ease with which Saulnier could claim the zodiac as a French possession attested to the ubiquity and familiarity of this point of view, which was the product of a constellation of European attitudes toward the East known today as “orientalism.”⁸ In nineteenth-century Paris, booksellers’ stalls were crowded with volumes devoted to the lore of Egypt, as well as with travelers’ accounts that fueled dreams of treasure hunting in the Valley of the Kings. The mysteries of ancient Egypt, of which the enigmatic hieroglyphs were the perennial emblem, had for centuries fascinated Western seekers and mystics, linguists and scholars. For over two centuries they had produced a general narrative about this most ancient of civilizations, a narrative that demanded material objects to complete and enliven it. To them, Egypt was a warehouse for antiques that belonged in European collections and museums, to be studied for whatever they might have to say about the origins of European civilization. (Although the civilization of ancient Egypt was considered thoroughly alien, it was often thought to be the unfathomable source of Europe’s own.) The very frontispiece to the atlas of the monumental account of the Napoleonic expedition’s activity—the Description de l’Égypte—communicated this attitude precisely, by depicting the Dendera ceiling set carelessly amidst statues and other objects like items for sale in a flea market (Figure 4.4). The haphazard arrangement made it clear that the value of Egypt’s antiquities inhered less in the objects themselves than in their abundance and apparent availability.

Pasha and Firman

Although Saulnier had ensured that Lelorrain was materially well prepared for his expedition, removing the zodiac from Egypt required more than ready cash and equipment: it required diplomacy. The politics of antiquities excavation were tricky and competitive, and Egypt’s stability was precarious. Decades of struggle against foreign invaders had left the country in social and political disarray, its treasures vulnerable to the incursions of vandals like Lelorrain. Egyptians after all had greater problems than the fate of ancient stones, no matter how important they seemed to be to foreigners. During his campaign of 1798, Napoleon had defeated the Mamelukes—a foreign slave-soldier caste that had for centuries alternately supported and struggled against the Ottomans in Egypt. But after the British forces routed the French, they allowed the surviving Mamelukes to regroup, laying the ground for a civil war between the Mamelukes and the Ottomans. The French invasion had reoriented Egyptian trade toward Europe and away from its traditional centers on the Red Sea, impoverishing Egypt’s artisan class, who could neither compete with the influx of cheap textiles from industrial Europe nor profit from the substantially increased demand for Egyptian raw materials by those same European factories.⁹ At the same time, Ottoman soldiers continued to pillage Alexandria and Cairo, so that daily commerce all but halted, the streets became thoroughly unsafe, and Egypt’s prized silk and cotton trades were abandoned, as was all learning.¹⁰ The civil conflict began to wind down in 1806 when the Mamelukes were evicted from Cairo at the hands of Mehmet Ali, a former coffee dealer born in Kavala, in what is now Macedonia, who by canny manipulation of Cairo’s complicated politics had lifted himself to prominence within the Ottoman power structure in Egypt.¹¹ Ali’s final victory over the Mamelukes in the Cairo massacre of 1811 consolidated his position as ruler of Egypt, which meant, among other things, that it was to Ali that Saulnier had to apply for permission to excavate, and to Ali that Lelorrain would have to address any problems that might crop up during his sojourn at Dendera.¹²

Ali had been made viceroy of Egypt in 1805, but his sphere of real influence was limited primarily to Cairo until the Mameluke massacre of 1811. He remained in control until 1848 and died the following year.¹³ Ali’s European visitors found him somewhat preoccupied but also congenial, dignified, and down-to-earth. He certainly disappointed Europeans who arrived at his quarters expecting to meet a so-called oriental despot like those caricatured in then-popular travelogues about the East.¹⁴ Traveling through Egypt on a trip to India in 1806, George Annesley, the Viscount of Valentia, struggled, as many Europeans in Egypt did, to integrate his experiences with his expectations. Annesley described Ali as “a little man of intelligent countenance, with a reddish brown beard of moderate dimensions” that, Annesley conjectured, must have been a source of “pride” for Ali, “as he was continually stroking it.” Annesley later noted that when coffee was served, “the cup out of which [Ali] drank was set with diamonds,” an opulent detail that contrasted sharply with Annesley’s appraisal of Ali’s residence as “remarkable neither for its size nor its richness.”¹⁵ Dr. R. R. Madden, who visited in 1826, observed that Ali was a restless person with a “ruddy fair complexion and light hazel eyes, deeply set in their sockets, and overshadowed with prominent eyebrows,” and given to insomnia.¹⁶ The French traveler Edouard de Montulé, in Egypt from 1816 to 1819, admired Ali for having “a physiognomy characteristic of his conduct; it is cold, like that of the Turks [musulmans], but noble, majestic, and dignified according to the rank he has attained.”¹⁷ Still others praised Ali as a talented horse-and swordsman, a crack shot who excelled at throwing the djerid (javelin), a person of “prompt, decisive” character who was also a shrewd and entertaining conversationalist.¹⁸ Even Saulnier, who had little to gain from flattering the pasha by the time his book on the Dendera zodiac appeared in Paris, praised Ali to the skies, aligning him with Ptolemy I, the first Greek successor to the pharaohs, in virtue of the fact that both men happened to be born in Macedonia. He applauded Ali’s efforts to modernize Egypt; and he invited the reader to compare Ali favorably with great leaders of the past by sharing the list of books that Ali had reportedly asked Saulnier to obtain for translation, which included biographies of Peter the Great and Frederick II of Prussia, together with the writings of Napoleon and Plutarch’s Lives, a selection that seemed calculated to suggest that the pasha was—like Saulnier’s implied reader—an educated person with a taste for the classics and an interest in Europe’s storied military and political figures.¹⁹

Less admirable aspects of Ali’s character also attracted notice—although, again, special care must be exercised since the exoticizing tenor of European travel writing made exaggerations de rigueur. Robert, Richardson, a British traveler who accompanied the Earl of Belmore up the Nile in 1817–1818 noted that, at the age of forty, Ali remained illiterate (notwithstanding Saulnier’s list of books); when Ali finally learned to read and write, Richardson claimed that he was not especially good at either; and, astonishingly, he never learned to speak Arabic.²⁰ His sexual appetite was a matter of some interest as well. In his travelogue, De Montulé reported that Ali “adores the pleasures of women” and claimed, moreover, that “his harem is composed of more than five hundred females.”²¹ Finally, in a time and place often noted for its violence, Ali could be exceptionally duplicitous, ruthless, and bloody-minded. In 1811, after inviting between four hundred and five hundred Mamelukes to a banquet at the Cairo citadel, Ali secretly ordered an attack on the assembly. As the killing commenced, he looked on, crying “Vras! Vras!” (Kill! Kill!). Nearly a thousand people died in the carnage, which continued for six days, spilling into the harems. Ali was forced to kill several of his own men in order to halt the violence.²²

These peccadilloes notwithstanding, Europeans generally admired Ali. He was courted by European consuls, who preferred him to the recalcitrant Mamelukes, and who had their eyes on Egypt as a strategic spot for trade with the Middle East and southern Asia.²³ In addition, he was generous with subsidies and positions for foreigners, who ran the businesses and factories that he founded and who trained his army.²⁴

Ordinary Egyptians liked him much less. That Ali was more generous to foreigners than to the people he ruled was just one example of the policies that made him unpopular. Although he is remembered for ridding Egypt of the Mamelukes, Ali’s efforts to modernize the country came at a tremendous cost to his subjects, beginning with a bitterly resented conscription policy that blighted the young adulthood of two generations of Egyptian men, the imposition of corvée labor, and extraordinarily heavy taxation. Ali’s monopolization of production included surveillance of peasants, who were watched closely to ensure that not a single olive or boll of cotton was diverted from Ali’s coffers. Although Ali did undertake useful improvements to the Nile irrigation systems, as well as the construction of the Mahmoudiyah Canal between Alexandria and the Nile (linking Cairo more closely to the Mediterranean), his success depended on the subjugation of legions of workers who labored for little pay under the threatening eyes of his troops. Although the Mameluke alternative was generally thought to be worse, ordinary Egyptians—upon whom Lelorrain would soon rely for the efforts required to remove the zodiac from the ceiling of the temple at Dendera—were hardly fond of Ali Pasha.²⁵

Lelorrain was not the only European treasure hunter on the Upper Nile. He had two chief rivals on the ground in Egypt: Henry Salt, the British consul, and Bernardino Drovetti, who had been consul for the French in Egy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: All This for Two Stones?
• Chapter 2: Antiquity Imagined
• Chapter 3: The Origin of All Religions
• Chapter 4: On Napoleon’s Expedition
• Chapter 5: One Drawing, Many Words
• Chapter 6: The Dawn of the Zodiac Controversies
• Chapter 7: Ancient Skies, Censored
• Chapter 8: Egypt Captured in Ink and Porcelain
• Chapter 9: Egyptian Stars under Paris Skies
• Chapter 10: The Zodiac Debates
• Chapter 11: Champollion’s Cartouche
• Chapter 12: Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Figure Sources
• Subject Index
• Name Index