garden complex, which was enclosed by walls, providing the members and their savant colleagues with one of the most pleasant spots in the city. The Institute would soon include all manner of facilities, including an extensive library consisting largely of the books Napoleon himself had selected to bring with him on the expedition: a core compendium of Western literature and knowledge. At the other end of the scale was the foundry and workshop established by Conté, where he set about reconstructing as far as possible all the scientific instruments and equipment that had been lost in Alexandria harbor, as well as the further losses in one of the ships sunk in Aboukir Bay at the Battle of the Nile. A meridian line was marked out along the floor of the main corridor of the Institute building, recording the precise number of degrees by which Cairo lay east of the Paris meridian, which was at the time used by the French as the marker for 0º when measuring longitude.
Halls and loggias in the two Mameluke palaces were adapted for use as chemistry laboratories and study rooms, and cellars were soon being used to house the scientific collections that were already being made by the savants. As soon as the printing presses arrived by camel from Alexandria, they were set up at the Institute (the only other printing presses in the entire Levant were at Constantinople and a Maronite Christian convent in Lebanon). These printing presses would become a source of some concern to the ulema and sheiks of the Al-Azhar mosque, who insisted that the only font of true knowledge was the Koran, of which they alone were the rightful interpreters. Without such authority any book could only be the devil’s work. However, it seems the wise men of the Al-Azhar mosque were being somewhat disingenuous here, for one of the French savants who befriended a sheik discovered that his library did in fact contain a number of non-religious works—including a treatise on love, an anthology of sayings and poems, a book of historical curiosities, instructions for the drawing up of marriage and divorce contracts, and a manual of sexual techniques.
Outside the palaces, the extensive gardens of the Institute would gradually be transformed into botanical gardens for the study of indigenous plants, and a small menagerie of birds, monkeys and snakes would be assembled. The savants would regularly meet in these gardens in informal assembly, as one of them remembered:
We had at the side of the palace of Hassan-Kachef Bey the vast garden of Kassim Bey where we would gather for our evening promenade. The conversation of Fourier contributed great charm to these meetings; sometimes Monge would expand on his views of the future of Egypt, sometimes on his skeptical ideas, sometimes on his latest ideas regarding his beloved descriptive geometry. He spoke with such enthusiasm that it colored his entire imagination. The beauty of the night sky, the scent of the orange trees, the sweet and pleasant airs, all added to the ambience of our meetings, which went on into much of the night. 5
But Cairo was not the only center of intellectual activity: a number of savants remained at Rosetta under the charge of the governor, General Menou. According to one of them: “All twenty of us live together in a house, where we share everything in common, including rations and fresh water. We are looked after by three Maltese former slaves and a local Frenchman, whom several of us ganged together to take on.” 6 The most industrious of these savants was the precocious twenty-seven-year-old biologist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who at twenty-one had delivered the first lectures on zoology at the university in Paris, a year later being appointed to the first chair in this subject. In his own words: “It is my good fortune to have the encouragement and protection of General Menou . . . who has given me an armed escort so that I can go deep into the delta and hunt there safely. I have
Halls and loggias in the two Mameluke palaces were adapted for use as chemistry laboratories and study rooms, and cellars were soon being used to house the scientific collections that were already being made by the savants. As soon as the printing presses arrived by camel from Alexandria, they were set up at the Institute (the only other printing presses in the entire Levant were at Constantinople and a Maronite Christian convent in Lebanon). These printing presses would become a source of some concern to the ulema and sheiks of the Al-Azhar mosque, who insisted that the only font of true knowledge was the Koran, of which they alone were the rightful interpreters. Without such authority any book could only be the devil’s work. However, it seems the wise men of the Al-Azhar mosque were being somewhat disingenuous here, for one of the French savants who befriended a sheik discovered that his library did in fact contain a number of non-religious works—including a treatise on love, an anthology of sayings and poems, a book of historical curiosities, instructions for the drawing up of marriage and divorce contracts, and a manual of sexual techniques.
Outside the palaces, the extensive gardens of the Institute would gradually be transformed into botanical gardens for the study of indigenous plants, and a small menagerie of birds, monkeys and snakes would be assembled. The savants would regularly meet in these gardens in informal assembly, as one of them remembered:
We had at the side of the palace of Hassan-Kachef Bey the vast garden of Kassim Bey where we would gather for our evening promenade. The conversation of Fourier contributed great charm to these meetings; sometimes Monge would expand on his views of the future of Egypt, sometimes on his skeptical ideas, sometimes on his latest ideas regarding his beloved descriptive geometry. He spoke with such enthusiasm that it colored his entire imagination. The beauty of the night sky, the scent of the orange trees, the sweet and pleasant airs, all added to the ambience of our meetings, which went on into much of the night. 5
But Cairo was not the only center of intellectual activity: a number of savants remained at Rosetta under the charge of the governor, General Menou. According to one of them: “All twenty of us live together in a house, where we share everything in common, including rations and fresh water. We are looked after by three Maltese former slaves and a local Frenchman, whom several of us ganged together to take on.” 6 The most industrious of these savants was the precocious twenty-seven-year-old biologist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who at twenty-one had delivered the first lectures on zoology at the university in Paris, a year later being appointed to the first chair in this subject. In his own words: “It is my good fortune to have the encouragement and protection of General Menou . . . who has given me an armed escort so that I can go deep into the delta and hunt there safely. I have
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