Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

by Ariel Sabar

The expedition was, for Napoleon, a rare military fiasco. Under the cover of an August night in 1799, he slipped onto a frigate back to Europe, leaving Egypt to chaos and his soldiers to privation and mutiny. Napoleon could claim for his misadventure just one triumph: it had opened the land of the Pharaohs to the exploits of Western scholars. Along with arms, ships and soldiers, Napoleon had ferried with him from France some 170 intellectuals, or savants—some of the most luminous scientists, artists and engineers of his day. The savants returned with drawings of Egyptian wonders, from the tombs at Luxor to the zodiac at Dendera. A company of French soldiers expanding a fort near the town of Rosetta, meanwhile, uncovered a slab of polished granite engraved with three parallel blocks of text: one in Egyptian hieroglyphs; one in Greek; and one in demotic, a precursor to Coptic. The slab would become known as the Rosetta Stone. The French scholar Jean-François Champollion used its side-by-side translations to crack the code of hieroglyphics, opening the writings of the ancient Egyptians to the modern world. The savants published their extraordinary finds in a set of twenty-three volumes, Description de l’Égypte, that effectively established the field of Egyptology and lofted Europe into the throes of “Egyptomania.”