As part of the Heritage Days and the bicentenary of the deciphering of hieroglyphs, the Institute of the Arab World invites Michel Sidhom, President of the Institut d'Orient, for a conference on «Napoleon Bonaparte to Jean-François Champollion.»
The Egyptian Expedition of 1798, commissioned by Talleyrand and led by Napoleon Bonaparte, was intended to take the Suez route back to trade instead of the Cape of Good Hope route, to destroy the power of England in India, the foundation of its greatness in Europe.
This was the main mission of the 154 scientists, surrounded by 54,000 soldiers and sailors. Their presence transformed the failure of a war of conquest into an unprecedented cultural enterprise, with the publication of the most monumental work ever devoted to a land and its people: The Description of Egypt.
Naguib-Michel Sidhom will show, on several volumes of the copy preserved in the Library of the IMA, the contributions and the errors of «scientists», in particular their attempts to understand the hieroglyphs, by classifying them in tables, and their magnificent reproductions of the Rosetta stone, discovered in 1799, which they had the intuition could contribute to it.
Jean-François Champollion was deciphered in 1822 and his General Principles of Egyptian Sacred Writing became the key to millennia of human history. These two works thus constitute the birth of Egyptology.