Book Review: Mirage

New York Sun

Mirage by Nina Burleigh
Review by Matthew Price

Napoleon enlisted a corps of France's brightest thinkers, known as the savants. In their three-year stay, the savants would endure hardship, death, and disease as they excavated ruins and fathomed the mysteries of the Pyramids. (They unearthed the famed Rosetta Stone, the key to translating hieroglyphics, on one such expedition.) The savants mapped Cairo, as engineers tried to bring the unruly Nile under control and naturalists cataloged Egypt's teeming wildlife. Some learned Arabic (one French general took a Muslim wife, converted to Islam, and called himself Abdullah), while others lost their health — and their minds — in the harsh Egyptian clime.

Their findings were published between 1809 and 1828 in a 23-volume collection called "The Description of Egypt," itself a landmark of modern scholarship, unrivaled in the annals of 19th-century intellectual life for its staggering collation of sources and its exhaustive depiction of ancient and modern Egyptian cultures. Though the savants helped establish Egyptology as a field of inquiry, the judgment of posterity has been mixed. Edward Said sneered at the enterprise, which he called "engulfment of Egypt by the Western instruments of knowledge and power." Nina Burleigh takes a more measured tack in "Mirage" (HarperCollins, 286 pages, $25.95). For her, the savants were disinterested researchers who "tried to approach the land, the people, the relics not as tourists or literary travelers, or even colonizers, but from within their fields of scholarship." Still, her account is flawed by its avoidance of the issues about colonialism and scholarship, which are mentioned only in passing.

Ms. Burleigh is more interested in the savants themselves. Building her narrative around the lives of about a dozen of these men, she tells a lively story.

See the above page for the full review.
Mirage has also been reviewed on The Canadian Press website.