In 1777 an exploratory venture to Egypt was commissioned by Louis 16th to determine the possibility of making the country a colony of France. This little-known expedition preceded the Napoleonic campaign by 20 years, but it has not received the attention it deserves as a predecessor to the more celebrated venture. Led by Francoise, baron de tott “was considered an expert on the Muslim east.”
It included a naval officer and naturalist named Nicolas sigisbert sonnini de manoncourt, the subject of this article, and other specialists, including artists and artisans. De tott published his memoirs of the Turks and Tartars, which included an account of the Egyptian separate English translations at the time of the later large-scale expedition of Bonaparte.
Nicolas sonnini was born in 1751. He studied with the Jesuits at Pont a mousson, where he received a doctorate of philosophy at fifteen. He went on to study law, but his interest in natural history and exploration led him to enlist as a naval cadet. His first foreign experience was gained in cayenne in Guiana in 1772. He collected rare birds and made observations that resulted in his being awarded the Naturaliste voyager du government title.
After the second voyage to Guiana in 1775m, he was selected to join de tott’s group on the journey to Egypt, where he was able to continue his pursuits as a naturalist.
In his travels, he recorded much of what he saw of the people, the animal, plant life, and antiquities.
He anticipated Lane’s classic modern Egyptians by almost fifty years in his descriptions of contemporary customs.
With his training in arts and science, he was equipped to make a remarkable number of observations in many fields of investigation. Regrettably. His record of Egypt in the second half of the eighteenth century is little read today.
Sonnini departed from Toulon with the de tott expedition in April 1777 on the frigate Atlanta. Several ports of call, including Genoa, Palermo, and Malta, arrived in Alexandria in mid-June. In all, he was able to spend eighteen months in Egypt, during which time he visited the western delta, the wadi natrun, and the length of the Nile as far south as the villages of Karnak and Luxor. The intention of his mission only somewhat colors the nature of his description of the county: to determine the suitability of Egypt as a French colony.
There are numerous digressions in his narrative where he speaks of when he believes that the land will prosper under french direction and guidance and inserts suggestions to those to follow him as to the “proper “methods to cope with local problems to manage the inhabitants.
When his manuscript was being prepared for its original publication, a proposal he added was the renaming of the Pompey pillar in Alexandria with the title of “column of the french republic “and attendant transportation of that monument to Paris. Standing in a public square, it could not fail to produce the most majestic effect.
Although obelisks were transported, Pompey pillar fortunately never received that kind of treatment.
As an educated European, Sonsini’s relations with the Egyptians he encountered were, at best, uneven.
When he was able to strike up a friendship or where he had a particularly hospital host or reliable guide, his observations reflect the increased ease with which he traveled and moved among the people.
In Sonni’s pay, the local reaction to European dress was still so made that he was wise to assume eastern costume early in his stay, a custom adopted by others in his time and well into the nineteenth century.
He learned little Arabic and was forced to use interpreters. He employs Arabic words or phrases in his account. They are generally still recognizable in the french transliteration, which has been retained in the English translation. Even small villages can be located on modern maps if sufficient allowance is made for the variety of spellings used by European travelers and cartographers.
Sonnini spent a month abroad in Atlanta in the harbor of Alexandria, perhaps a good choice of accommodation but still subject to “continual rolling.” From his ship, he could visit the city and gives the following description :
Like those of Levant, its houses have flat terrace roofs; they have no windows. The apertures that supply their place are almost entirely obstructed by a wooden lattice projection of various forms and so close that the light can hardly force a passage.
He observed that “beauty” was permitted to see what passed in the street without being seen as a result of the latticework, the mashrabiya, that concealed them.
Still, this observation also gave him a chance to moralize on the state of what he saw the oppressed womanhood of Egypt and the “tyrannical” attitudes of the Egyptian male . of Alexandria itself :
Narrow and awkwardly disposed of streets are without pavement as without police; no public edifice, no private building arrested the eye of the travelers, and on the supposition that the fragments of the old city had not attracted his attention, he would find no object in the present one that could supply matter for a moment’s thought.
Turks, Arabian, Babarsques, Copts, Christians from Syria, jewes constituted a population estimated at 5 thousand as far as estimation can be made in a country where there is no register kept of anything.
In short, he preferred European architecture with decorated exteriors to the architecture of the east with its inward orientation. His scientific bet was offended by the governmental lack of concern with statistics and attention to the order that a Frenchman of his time would have found lacking; his impressions of Cairo were colored because Europeans were not treated well.
He was forced to live in a district allotted to the french, shut in by a gate and guarded by “janizarie.” He sums up his dislike for Cairo by quoting hasselquist: “if a man were guilty of any crime, he could not expiate it better than by going to reside a little while in Cairo. “
Even so, he was able to visit houses with lofty interiors, make a circuit of the city walls, see the citadel and climb the mokattam hills to the east. In the 1830’s Edward Lane, in modern Egyptians, was restrained by modesty from writing a description of the popular dances he saw. Still, sonnini had no such scruple; their dances consisted of Quik and significant movements of the loins. These women agitate with extreme suppleness but great indecency, the rest of the body remaining still.
Sonnini’s interest ranged from typical belly dance, even if it was of “great tendency.” It seems a pity that he found Alexandria a “den of thieves ‘ and Cairo a place of “barbarous” people. The 1770’s in Egypt were not yet the most receptive years for the coming of the European hordes.
As a naturalist, he described the animals, fishes, trees, and plants he observed, sometimes in a great delta. Using the developing scientific methods of his time, he attempted to evaluate each animal he encountered by comparing the same species found in other parts of the world.
Of the people, he speaks of physical appearance, dress, personal customs, such as the use of kohl and henna, female circumcision, and tattooing. Still, he had few sympathetic words for the Egyptian male because his contacts were most probably restricted to men. He could form a more telling impression of them. To sonnini, the Egyptian man was lazy, ignorant, intolerant, and unlikely to change.
Sonnini made a trip to the “wadi natrun” -on the west of Nile delta – a somewhat unusual venture for an early traveler. He examined the Rosetta branch of the Nile in the delta with considerable interest, for he was amazed to see how many ruins there were to be found along the banks of that water-way.
His inspection of the interior of the great pyramid at Giza was hurried and “fearful” because he was concerned for his safety. It is not clear from his descriptions if he visited Saqqara at all.
On the twenty-first of March 1788, he departed from boulaq on the voyage, taking him as far south as Luxor.
The mud huts of the dwellers on the Nile caught his eye, as did the peasants working the shaduf, the lever-like device for raising water to the level of the fields.
His progress south is easy to trace on a map because he names every village, many of which still exist.
On a brief stop at Antipolis, he saw the triumphal arch, still standing, which has since vanished. He set his draftsman the task of drawing structure, but this was interrupted by the approaching gang of “robbers.” Local people told him that the doors from this arch or gateway had been covered with iron plates, but they had been transported to Cairo by a “devil.” At denera, sonnini had the good fortune to be entertained by an “emir” who provided him with horses, guides, and even the offer of workmen if he had wanted to try this hand at an excavation.
I found myself before one of the most beautiful monuments of ancient Egypt, which time and the fatal genius of destruction had equally assailed, but which, in part, withstood their strokes and their efforts.
One of the most striking edifices in which antiquity has endeavored to impress the seal of immortality.
His admiration for the Dendera temple was almost without bounds; his wrath against the local fellah s who had contributed to its defacements was as strong.
From Dendera, he proceeded south toward Luxor . with stops on the way. One sentiment that almost every traveler echoes deserve quoting :
(of the insects) the most numerous and troublesome are the flies. They cruelly torment both man and beast. No idea can be formed of their obstinate rapacity when they wish to fix some part of the body. It is vain to drive them away, they return in the exact moment, and their perseverance wears out the most patient spirit.
The flies of Egypt seem to have a character of their own; it is no different today than in Sonsini’s time. He was also constantly annoyed by the presence of lice. The search for body lice he and his companions characterized as “hunting a la Turquie.”
In mid-July, he arrived at the “miserable village ” of Karnak, which he was aware of as ancient Thebes. Like every traveler, he was moved to record his impression in an almost poetic description on first seeing the ancient monuments.
I felt inclined more than once to prostrate myself in token veneration before monuments, the rearing of which appeared to transcend the strength and genius of man.
Let the so much boasted fabrics of Greece and Rome come and bow down before temples and the places of the Thebes of Egypt . its lofty ruins are still more striking than their gaudy ornaments. Its massive wrecks are more majestic than their perfect preservation.
He began his tour on horseback but could not complete either the inspection of the ruins or the drawings that he had wished to make of them. He suddenly found himself in the center of a war zone where the forces of maraud bay and those of his enemies examined ancient remains, a dangerous occupation. Delaying his departure, much against the wishes of the sheik of Luxor who feared for sonninis safety, he crossed to the west bank to visit courna to attempt to see the ruins on the other side of the river.
Although his companions were afraid for his safety, on his arrival, sonnini immediately bargained for antiquities. He visited some of the ruins, including a “superb portico” and the fragments of a colossal statue he identified as “Memnon.” His description is somewhat vague, and he may have seen the ramesseum, the mortuary temple of Ramses the second, with its gigantic fallen statue of that king. Still, he might just as quickly have been describing the temple of seti the first . one of the disappointments of his trip through Egypt he describes in the following manner :
I was very desirous of visiting some spacious grottos, cut in the rock, about a league to the west of Gourna, the crypts of the ancient monarchs of Thebes.
But I could find nobody who would undertake to conduct me thither; the sheik himself assured me that the people of gourna being at war with some neighboring villages, a few of whose inhabitants they had lately killed, it would be imprudent to expose myself with guides taken from among them, who, far from affording me protection, would rather, be the cause of bringing down upon my head the eff
ects of implacable revenge.
After having made way up the Nile to Luxor and Gourna, sonnini was prevented from visiting tombs of the kings and nobles and had to be content with escaping with his life.
The English clergyman, Richard Pocock, and the danish naval officer, Frederick Norden, who were both in Egypt 1737, were successful in visiting the royal tombs and must have arrived at a time of more benign conditions in the mid-eighteenth century than sonnini found at his later date, but to see local villages in peace with each other in Egypt is still sometimes a matter of chance.
Sonnini and his party stayed one night at Gourna, which was disturbed in turn by a pack of gigantic rats and the collapse of part of the house wall.
The remainder of the night was spent in “walking in the open air, with our muskets on our shoulders.”
He encountered difficulties leaving Gourna by boat and was obliged to travel on horseback to Naqada and Ques.
As he made his way north, he made his way north, re-visited Dendera, and at balyana, he heard descriptions of ruins but could not see them. What he missed was presumably the site of the Abydos. North of manfalout, a fight broke out on the boat that they had acquired; four deserters from the army of Murad bey had been allowed to join the party by the reis, head man, of the vessel.
When they discovered that sonnini and his companions were Europeans, they missed no opportunity to insult the infidels. He broke up the resulting fight by applying the flat of his saber to the soldiers and aggressors, but the result was that he saw the ruins of Antipolis for the second time from the safety of the ship’s cabin.
He was brought to the trail at el Minya for the crime of having struck Muslim, but he had well learned the country’s customs during his trip and bribed his way out of the difficulty. On the fourth of September 1776, he returned to Cairo after an absence of five months. After a few days’ rest at Rosetta, one of the Egyptian cities that pleased his European sensibility the most, he found passage on a ship bound for Smyrna. On the seventeenth of October, he sailed from Alexandria and soon lost sight of the flat and nacked regions of a country where the prodigies of art seemed to vie with the wonders of nature. ”
Sonnini left an account of Egypt that differs somewhat from other travelers. He was trained as a naturalist, and that discipline colors his observations of the country.
His picture of Egypt in 1778 is one of the situations filled with danger for the traveling foreigner. He was often concerned for his safety . od baron de tott, the leader of the expedition commissioned by the king of France, we learn very little.
Sonnini had a low estimation of the Egyptian people and compared Egypt to Europe. He knew to the discredit of the country he saw for the first time. His narrative is uneven, but it reflects his diverse interests and the ever-changing conditions of travel. In its published version, the travel journal is amplified by comments and opinions added later. Its popularity in English translation was due to the recent invasion of Egypt by Bonaparte, and Sonsini’s travel was offered to the English public to expose the background to the current political situation.
Sonnini’s original purpose was to evaluate Egypt as a possible french colony, and the publication of his accounts revealed that french design on Egypt has a long history.
The French savants were able to succeed to a great extent because of their number, areas of specialization, extended time, and proper equipment. He was working independently. Sonnini didn’t have their advantages, but he left his memorable account in his “travels.”