egyptian stars under paris skies

20 E N G I N E E R I N G & S C I E N C E N O . 4

21E N G I N E E R I N G & S C I E N C E N O . 4

One evening in early July of 1822 a groupgathered for dinner at the home of the leadingfigure in French science, the Marquis de Laplace,outside Paris. The guests included five of themost distinguished physicists and chemists of theday: Jean-Baptiste Biot, famed for his experimen-tal work in optics and electricity; François Arago,rapidly becoming an influential administrator ofscience, the editor of an important journal, andhimself a reasonably accomplished experimenterin optics; Joseph Fourier, who had developed theseries representation now termed Fourier analysisand whose controversial theory of thermal diffu-sion had already been widely discussed; theinfluential chemist Claude Berthollet; and JohnDalton, the English protagonist of the atom.

The previous several years had seen remarkabledevelopments in French science, including funda-mental discoveries in electricity, magnetism, heat,and optics. Most of the dinner guests had partici-pated in these events, often on opposing sides.Biot and Arago were scarcely on speaking terms,Fourier’s mathematics and his heat theory were notwell thought of by Biot and Laplace, and Berthol-let had little sympathy for chemical atomism. Yetthe evening’s conversation had nothing to do withphysics, chemistry, or mathematics. Instead, theguests discussed the arrival in Paris of a zodiacfrom a ceiling in the Egyptian temple of Dendera,

bought by King Louis XVIII for an immense sum.This was not the first time that Dendera had

ignited discussion. On his return from Napoleon’scolonial expedition to Egypt in 1799, the artistVivant Denon had made available his sketch ofwhat certainly looked like a zodiac. In short orderarticles appeared concerning the age of what manytook to be a relic of antique Egyptian skies. For ifthe zodiac were literally an image of the heavens,then astronomy might be used to establish its dateof production. Since hieroglyphs were to remainunreadable for another two decades, Denderaoffered the tantalizing possibility of establishingEgyptian chronology on the basis of somethingbeyond the few Greek and Latin texts that hadbeen carefully studied by Renaissance humanists.Though some of these texts contained words thatcould be interpreted astronomically, a great dealof speculation and argument was needed. SeveralFrench scientists of the day were convinced thatthe Dendera ceiling was much more reliable thanwords. Words, filtered through the sieves ofhuman culture and history, were thought by anearly cadré of French savants known as Idéologues—who were concerned with social systems—to beimperfect reflections of external reality. Imagesseemed to be different, more trustworthy, becausethey were considered to connect directly tooriginal sensations stimulated by the naturalworld. Here lay the seeds of a growing mismatchbetween historical and scientific sensibilities, atleast in 19th-century France, and likely elsewhereas well.

The French astronomer and head of the ParisBureau of Longitude, Jérome de Lalande, heardabout Denon’s as yet unpublished sketch in 1800.Reports that he read seemed to indicate that thecircular zodiac was at least 4,000 years old. Fur-thermore, a second star ceiling discovered at Esnehseemed to be older still, dating perhaps to 7,000years before the present era. If Esneh were thatold, Lalande concluded, then a claim made by one

Egypt ian Stars under Par is Skies

by Jed Z. Buchwald

Several French scientists of the day were convinced

that the Dendera ceiling was much more reliable

than words.

Left: Napoleon urges on

his troops at the Battle of

the Pyramids. (Detail from

Antoine-Jean Gros,

Bonaparte haranguant

l’armée avant la bataille

des Pyramides, le 21 juillet

1798.) But, while he won

the battle, he lost the war.

Napoleon left Egypt in

1799; his deputy was

assassinated (below: Victor

Adam, Assassination of

Kléber by a fanatic, 14

June 1800); and the English

defeated the French

in 1801.

far up the Nile. Sawnand exploded out of itssite by a French archae-ological vandal namedClaude Lelorrain, theDendera zodiac rousedParisian salons andinstitutes to such anextent that for severalmonths it displaced allother topics, attractedcrowds of curious ad-mirers, and was soon


Charles Dupuis just before the French Revolutionconcerning the origins of religion, which inter-preted myths in astronomical terms, might wellbe correct. Dupuis had located the birthplace ofthe zodiac in an Egypt older by far than anychronology based on textual arguments—andespecially on the Books of Moses—could possiblyallow. (Standard biblical chronology placed theorigin of all things at about 4000 B.C.E.*) Accord-ing to Dupuis, the zodiac, and astronomy itself,was born near the Nile over 14,000 years ago.The Greeks, he insisted, were scientific childrencompared to the Egyptians, whose knowledge andwisdom underlay all of Western science andmathematics.

The details of Dupuis’ argument were new, andits feverish antireligiosity breathed the atmosphereof pre-Revolutionary France, but Egypt had beenconsidered the original source of knowledge asearly as the time of Plato. Scholars in the 17thcentury had provided countervailing arguments.Isaac Casaubon, for example, had demonstratedin 1614 that one group of texts—the influentialHermetic Corpus—actually dated from about 200

C.E. and not, as had been claimed, from Egypt nearthe time of Moses. Nevertheless, Egypt and themysteries of its hieroglyphs continued to capturethe European imagination throughout the 18thcentury. Constantin François Chasseboeuf, whohad renamed himself “Volney” in admiration forVoltaire and Voltaire’s residence, Ferney, produceda widely read account of his travels to Egypt andSyria between 1783 and 1785 that fed directlyinto this existing fascination. In his well-knownworks Volney argued that history amounts to asuccession of continually reemerging ancientcivilizations. This vision influenced Napoleon,who conceived his invasion of Egypt in 1798 asthe latest act in Volney’s grand historical drama.For Napoleon expected to be greeted as a liberatorby native Egyptians, descendants of a wise andgraceful past, who had been subjected for centuriesto the oppression of the Ottoman Turks and theirMameluke satraps.

The Napoleonic expedition was, in the end, amilitary debacle. Native Egyptians had little lovefor the Mamelukes, but neither did they greet theFrench invaders as liberators. Revolts and resis-tance to the occupation were frequent, and theFrench responded with great brutality. The Eng-lish fleet under Admiral Nelson destroyed theFrench armada not long after its arrival at Alexan-dria, effectively isolating the French army inEgypt. Napoleon returned clandestinely to Francea year later, leaving in charge General Kléber, whowas assassinated nine months afterward by a Syrianwho detested the presence of non-Muslims inEgypt and Syria. The French occupiers wereforced to capitulate to the English by the endof August 1801.

The military failure of this first French colonialinvasion of North Africa was soon overshadowedby the immense fund of knowledge concerningEgyptian antiquity that the expedition broughtback (as well as by effective Napoleonic propa-ganda). Here, too, French beliefs concerning the

Charles Dupuis’ Origin of

All Cults (frontispiece at

left), published in 1795,

traced all religions (and

myths) back to the

Egyptians’ knowledge of

astronomy. Dupuis dated

Egyptian astronomy and

the zodiac at 14,000 years

earlier, about 10,000 years

before biblical chronology

set the creation of the

world.

(*B.C.E. is before thecommon era; C.E. meanscommon era or Christianera.)


found what they had anticipated, as we can seefrom the iconography in the drawing (left) by oneof the artists who accompanied the expedition.

Note the attentive, busy artist dressed in Frenchjacket and Egyptian pantaloons, curved sword athis side. He stares intently at an ancient frieze ofwhat appear to be veiled pharaonic-era women. Atlower right sits the artist’s Egyptian companion,intent on nothing more than his hookah. Heclearly has nothing to do with the regal and mys-terious image that captures the artist’s attention.To see just how far Egypt had fallen from itsglorious past, we need only look at one of themagnificent drawings (left, below) through whichthe French imagined the Egypt of the pharaohs,where we see stately Egyptian priests, dressed likeRoman senators, walking with slow dignitythrough an imposing temple. This imagery, thiscontrast, together with the complex interactionsof the religiously indifferent conquerors with theunhappy and uneasy Muslim populace had pro-found effects on subsequent French, and indeedEuropean, views of the Muslim world—a worldthat was sophisticated, erudite, and elegant,though not in ways that even sympathetic Euro-peans of the day could easily appreciate.

Educated Egyptians reciprocated French dis-dain. Al-Jabarti, from Cairo, a chronicler of theinvasion, had this to say of the French establish-ment of a Diwan, or court, to adjudicate propertyissues—“In the form of this Diwan the Frenchestablished a basis for malice, a foundation forgodlessness, a bulwark of injustice, and a sourceof all manner of evil innovations.” Moreover, theFrench Arabists who accompanied the expeditionapparently had little sense of the language’s char-acter, which greatly annoyed Al-Jabarti, who de-plored their “incoherent words and vulgar con-structions.” Not only were the French linguisticbarbarians, they were disturbingly irreligious, for“they believe the world was not created, and thatthe heavenly bodies and the occurrences of theuniverse are influenced by the movement of thestars, and that nations appear and states decline,according to the nature of the conjunctions andthe aspects of the moon.” In Al-Jabarti’s worldthe alternative to divine destiny was mechanicalastrology, to which he thought the invadingFrench “materialists” were addicted. We livetoday in the unfortunate aftermath of early colo-nial contacts such as these with the Near East.

Admiration, even awe, for Egypt past grewamong the French in reciprocal measure to theirdisdain for Egypt present. The discovery of whatseemed to be four ancient zodiacs fit neatly intothis vision; all were rapidly assigned to millenniabefore (as we now know) the Greeks or even theBabylonians had developed astronomy. Thezodiacs were first found by General Desaix—twoat Esneh and two at Dendera—as he led his armyup the Nile near Luxor. The artist Vivant Denonrapidly sketched the most interesting of the four,

course of history influenced attitudes towardEgyptian civilizations, past and present. Napo-leon, trained as he was as a military engineer, andconsidering himself a natural philosopher andmathematician, had brought along on his flagshipmany of the most famous scientists of the day—his savants. Napoleon’s military did not get alongwell with the savants; neither did the soldiersexhibit much tolerance and understanding ofEgyptian customs. The savants (though militarymen themselves) had much greater sympathy andunderstanding for both the fellahin, or peasants,and the literate classes, but even they expected tofind a people debased, or at least mired in igno-rance, by centuries of alien oppression and byadherence to what they regarded as religioussuperstition. Of course, the savants thought allreligions to be forms of superstition, so in thisrespect their condescension was ecumenical. They

Egypt as it is (right) and

Egypt as it was (below), in

the eyes of the early-19th-

century French.


an intricate circular design found at Dendera; theother one at Dendera, as well as the two at Esneh,were rectangular. Denon’s drawing, along with hissketches and a romantic account of his voyagewith Napoleon’s army, were printed in a massivefolio edition in 1802. Smaller-sized printingsrapidly followed, and Denon’s Voyage became ahuge best-seller of the day, both in France and inEngland, where it was translated and publishedthat same year.

Even a quick glance at Denon’s sketch showswhat seem to be several easily identifiable zodiacalsymbols, such as Taurus (the bull) on the upperright, or Libra (the balance) on the lower left.And the circular form at once suggested to Frenchengineers and astronomers that this must be aplanisphere—a projection of the sky done by theancient Egyptians according to some rule. These,they thought, were not true cultural artifacts.Rather, the zodiacs skipped past the vagaries ofhuman life and society to reflect nature as it trulywas when they were produced. But what did theyshow, and when were they made?

Relying extensively on Dupuis’ argument thatthe zodiac originated in Egypt millennia ago, andthat its signs reflect the particular climatic con-ditions prevalent at the time, the astronomerJohann Karl Burckhardt and the engineer Jean-Baptiste Coraboeuf, both in Egypt as part of the

expedition, argued that the Dendera zodiacs wereproduced about 2000 B.C.E., and that one of thetwo at Esneh might reach as far back as 6000 B.C.E.

Moreover, Burckhardt and Coraboeuf arrived atsuch astonishingly antique dates using the pre-cession of the equinoxes, a phenomenon they wereconvinced was known to the ancient Egyptians.

The earth’s axis does not remain parallel to itselfas the planet revolves about the sun; it executes avery slow conical motion about the earth’s center,called precession. At the end of the 18th centurythe period for precession was known to be about25,748 years (as compared to the 36,000 yearsgiven by the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy inthe 2nd century C.E.). Precession affects chronol-ogy in the following way: The plane of the earth’sorbit cuts a great circle on the apparent sphere ofthe stars called the ecliptic, along which lie thezodiacal constellations. Since the sun appears tomove along the ecliptic, during the course of theyear it travels bit by bit through the zodiac. Twicea year the sun lies at the intersection of the eclipticwith the projection of the earth’s equator onto thestellar sphere, and at these equinoctial points thehours of day and night are equal. The two pointsthat lie on the ecliptic at 90° to the equinoxes arethe solstices, and here the hours of daylight arelongest (at the summer solstice) or shortest (at thewinter solstice). Because of precession, the posi-tion of the sun at the equinoxes and the solsticeswith respect to the zodiacal constellations changesover time. For example, in about 2000 B.C.E. thespring equinox lay in Libra, and the summersolstice in Leo; whereas by 1800 C.E., the springequinox had moved to Virgo and the summersolstice to Cancer.

One of the rectangular zodiacs at Esneh had thesign for Virgo at its left end, while the comparableone at Dendera had Leo in the same position. Thecircular zodiac, Burckhardt and Coraboeuf argued,seemed to spiral in from Leo (a doubtful claim,given Denon’s sketch—or even the original). If

Vivant Denon sketched the

round zodiac (left) in the

ceiling of the Temple of

Dendera, publishing it in

1802. Contemporary

astronomers and engineers

believed it to be a true

representation of the sky

at the time the zodiac was

produced.


the astronomer and the engineerthat Dupuis’ arguments for

the extraordinary antiquityof Egypt were nowseconded by the most

modern of exactreasoning and observa-tions. Coraboeuf wentso far as to claim thatthe zodiacs “bearstriking witness to theknowledge that theancient Egyptians hadof that astronomicalphenomenon, theprecession of the

equinoxes.”Burckhardt and

Coraboeuf, like Dupuisbefore them, had fabricated a

new chronology out of a flimsy tissueof evidence. Why assume that the sequence

changed in nature over the years with the socialand political circumstances of Napoleonic andthen Restoration France.

Burckhardt and Coraboeuf’s dating becameknown from remarks printed in a volume describ-ing the pyramids at Ghiza by another member ofthe Napoleonic expedition named Grobert. Pub-licized a few years later by the astronomer andardent atheist Lalande, who nevertheless disagreedwith their claims, these early remarks soon pro-duced a powerfully antagonistic reaction. Foreven the dating of the circular zodiac to no laterthan 2000 B.C.E. came perilously close to theperiod assigned to Noah’s flood, namely about2300 B.C.E., as established by such 17th-centurychronologers as Dionysius Petavius or BishopUsher. As one ardent objector named Dalmas putit a number of years later, “Since everything onearth bears witness to a catastrophe similar to thedeluge, and since even our incredulous onesbelieve in it, or at least can’t deny it, [to accepttheir views would mean] to think that, from themoment the deluge ceased, men worked anew toreproduce their settlements on the earth . . . andit seems that a period of 17 to 20 thousand yearswould be required between us and the deluge—that’s where this philosophy takes us.”

Mosaic chronology, along with religious senti-ment and belief, had long been subject to derisionby French philosophes. On a visit to Paris in 1774the English natural philosopher Joseph Priestley,who himself held decidedly unusual theologicalviews, remarked that he found “all the philosophi-cal persons to whom I was introduced at Paris,unbelievers in Christianity, and even professedAtheists. As I chose on all occasions to appear as aChristian, I was told by some of them, that I wasthe only person they had ever met with, of whoseunderstanding they had any opinion, who pro-fessed to believe in Christianity.” Dupuis’ work,which appeared in book form 20 years later,shortly after the end of the Revolutionary Terror,had grown in fertile ground.

But circumstances had changed considerably by1802. In July 1801 Napoleon, as First Consul,and Pope Pius VII agreed to reestablish the

the first sign in the rectangular zodiacs markedthe summer solstice then, precessing backwardsin time until the solstice occurred in Leo, theDendera zodiacs had been produced no later than2000 B.C.E. Taking the rectangular Esneh zodiacto begin with Virgo, it would date to about 5000B.C.E. Since even the Dendera representationsmust have been preceded by at least several

centuries of development, it seemed to

in the rectangular zodiac begins with the summersolstice? The solstice is, after all, extraordinarilyhard to pin-point by observation, and in any caseit was known from Greek texts that the Egyptianswere particularly concerned with the heliacalrising of the brightest star in the sky, Sirius—thatis, with the night when Sirius first appears, justbefore dawn. In Egyptian prehistory this eventcertainly preceded the annual flooding of the Nile,which was of obvious agricultural importance.Would not precession have moved Sirius alongwith the zodiacal stars, eventually decoupling itsheliacal rising from the solstice, and so from theannual inundation? We know today that theinundation occurs after the June beginning of therainy season in Ethiopia, where the Blue Nilerises. And yet Sirius’ heliacal rising remained acentral marker of the year throughout Egyptianhistory.

These kinds of objections, which in variousforms appeared over the years, are essentially tech-nical. They presume that the zodiacs are reason-ably accurate drawings of the heavens as the Egyp-tians saw them at the time of their creation. Forthe next two decades many participants in theintense controversies that soon erupted did pre-sume just that. This meant that objectors to theseveral dating schemes that emerged had either tooffer technical counterpoints, or to propose newschemes of their own. Both types of critiquesoccurred. And, we shall see, the controversy

During the course

of a year, the sun appears

to move through the

zodiac along the plane of

the ecliptic. But because

of precession of the earth’s

axis (over many thousands

of years), the position of

the sun changes over time

with respect to an

individual constellation at

a given point of the year,

say the summer solstice

(yellow dots). Locating

the summer solstice in

Virgo in 5000 B.C.E.

provided “evidence” of the

ancient age of the

Egyptian zodiacs.

The dour Dionysius

Petavius (right) dated

Noah’s flood at 2300 B.C.E.


Catholic Church in France as the religion “of thegreat majority,” though not of the state itself. Theagreement contained the provision that worshipmust conform “to such police regulations as thegovernment shall consider necessary to publictranquility.” Napoleon, though himself com-pletely irreligious, wished to avert any faith-inspired insurrections, and he used police powernot only to control public worship but also tomanage what the press might say about religion.Newspapers were not to print articles that wereeither critical of religion, or, conversely, that seemedto elevate religious claims above those of the state.Enforced by Napoleon’s chief of police, JosephFouché, press censorship rapidly dampened criticaldiscussions that had any kind of political tinge.

At this time the zodiac debates were just begin-ning. Scarcely a week before the Concordat wasannounced, a priest in Rome named DomenicoTesta, acting with the full approval of the Vatican,had produced a long screed on Dendera that vig-orously refuted the claims for its antiquity. Alsoin Rome, Ennio Quirino Visconti, an unsuccessfulrival of Vivant Denon’s for directorship of the newMusée Napoleon, further attacked Dendera’santiquity on the grounds that the temple showedevery sign of having been constructed in Greco-Roman times. Dupuis himself entered the fray in1806, but by then censorship had taken hold, andhe was careful to distance himself from discussionsof chronology; he would instead write only aboutthe “nature of the monument,” despite his ownlong-standing belief in the Egyptian origin andantiquity of the constellations. Fouché’s secretpolice were ubiquitous and feared, and Napoleonwas by now more than First Consul; he hadcrowned himself Emperor in 1804.

By 1809 the writer Chateaubriand, who dedi-cated his Génie du Christianisme to the dictatorNapoleon, had begun infecting a generation withRomantic religiosity and hatred of republicanism.His writings, and those of others like him, cast apall over skepticism, and certainly over criticalhistorical discussion. That year the first volumesof the magnificently illustrated Description del’Egypte appeared. With an introduction by JosephFourier—mathematician, member of the expedi-tion, and now Napoleon’s prefect in Isère—theDescription revived the Dendera affair. Moreover,the Description contained a detailed and reputedlyaccurate drawing of the Dendera zodiac by theFrench engineers. Thoroughly conscious of theregime’s aversion to anything that might offendbelief and revive political tensions, Fourier andEdme Jomard only insinuated and hinted at theirtrue views throughout the Description. Fourier hadconvinced himself that the zodiac dated to about2500 B.C.E., while the engineer Jomard, who hadalso investigated the metrics of the pyramids,opted for many millennia before that, no doubtfollowing Dupuis’ original chronology for theconstellations. This politically careful dance did

not fool anyone, though it was enough to avoidFouché’s censors, and over time many readersdiscerned Jomard’s and Fourier’s opinions.

Arguments for Egyptian antiquity were castfurther into the scholarly wilderness by theappearance in 1812 of Georges Cuvier’s masterfulaccount of the origins of fossils, and in particularits discussion of the ages of the earth. Cuvier, whohad crafted the science of comparative anatomy,argued for the earth’s having undergone a series ofrevolutions or catastrophes, with each one havingpropelled the globe into a new geological regime.The most recent, he asserted, was the BiblicalDeluge, so powerful and all-encompassing that noevidence of antediluvian humanity could possiblyhave remained. As to chronology, Cuvier wascircumspect in general, but not with regard tohuman history. Surveying with equal distance therecords of the Hebrews, Chinese, and Indians,Cuvier concluded that all supported the existenceof a massive flood at most several thousand yearsago. As for the Dendera zodiac, which he men-tioned, claims for its greater antiquity weredismissed. Cuvier, who had also mastered theniceties of patronage, which had led him to aposition of power by the beginning of the Empire,no doubt also understood the need for circumspec-tion in matters chronological.

Then, in 1814, after increasingly severe militarydefeats and social upheaval, Napoleon abdicatedand was exiled to Elba. Louis XVIII, brother ofthe decapitated king, returned with his entourageof embittered émigrés, who found their estatessold, their privileges eliminated, and, perhapsworst of all, their claims to social preeminenceusurped by a new class of nobles created byNapoleon. During the year of this First Restora-tion, Louis XVIII, though certainly no liberal byinclination, forestalled his angry relatives andaristocrats, attempting to create a new socialconsensus that would not be based on revenge.The properties that had been taken from churchand aristocracy and then sold off to politicalfunctionaries and Revolutionary profiteers werenot to be restored, easing the fears of their nowrespectable owners, who had been in possession fortwo decades. Press censorship markedly eased,though the agile Fouché remained chief of police.But Napoleon returned from Elba in the spring of1815, and the restored monarchy fled in anguishand anger. After Napoleon’s final defeat atWaterloo three months later the allies and there-restored monarchy would brook no compro-mise, though Louis, evidently conscious of politi-cal realities, again remained less punishment-minded than his vengeful aristocrats.

Occupied Paris was infested with English,Russian, and Prussian soldiers. The EnglishPrince Regent, in an effort to break the Frenchspirit once and for all, proposed removing all ofthe artworks that had been plundered fromFrance’s conquered territories for installation in


the Louvre. This, perhaps more than any singleevent of the occupation, deeply angered even thosewith Royalist sympathies. As one English visitorto the Louvre remarked, “Every Frenchman lookedlike a walking volcano ready to spit fire.” In theevent, few works of art were removed, due toclever maneuvers on the parts of Denon and others.Within a few years the Restoration governmenthad undertaken to imitate its Napoleonic prede-cessor in seeking glory through the theft andpurchase of artworks and antiquities.

Newspapers flourished during these years, andthe press certainly remained much freer thanunder Napoleon—though always under suspicion—but the monarchy nevertheless attempted toinfuse the nation (or at least Paris, where all im-portant events were thought to begin and end)with a renewed religiosity. It revived the faith-based pageantry of the ancien régime, leading tomawkish spectacles in which sanctimonious aris-tocrats paraded solemnly through the streets ofParis with lit candles—whereas police surveys ofthe day show that Parisians themselves had atnearly every level of society become more irreli-gious than ever before. The monarchy’s affinity forchurchly display, and its hatred for republicanism,was further exacerbated by the dramatic assassina-tion of the only male heir, the Duc de Berri (son ofLouis XVIII’s brother), at the Opéra in 1820 byan antireligious, anti-Bourbon saddler.

Restoration Paris had its salons, where the realwork of politics and social construction occurred.There were of course Royalist salons, but therewere Napoleonic ones as well. Vivant Denon, forexample, maintained a sort of shrine to the exiledemperor in his, surrounded by relics of the Egyptexpedition, among other plundered objects. Themost famous and active were the salons of theDuchesse de Duras, Madame de Montcalm, thePrincesse de Vaudrémont, the Maréchal Suchet,the painter Baron Gérard (frequented by Cuvier,among other savants), and the Duchesse de Broglie.Here elegance mingled with politics as words flewback and forth over the major issues of the day.

In the midst of this febrile mixture of religios-ity, politics, and social instability the Denderazodiac made its physical appearance in Paris. Themonarchy was interested in prestigious antiquitiesand works of art, and by the early 1820s a revivedsense of rivalry with England coursed throughFrench veins, especially where Egypt was con-cerned. Mehmet Ali, an Albanian originally inthe employ of the Turks, had by this time gainedfull control of the country, and he cleverly playedoff the French and the British against one anotherin his efforts at modernization. Not overly con-cerned with antiquities himself, in fact oftencontent to despoil ancient temples for theirlimestone, Ali would issue firmans, or permits, toforeigners for digging and even removal of relics.A man with an avid desire for the competitive(and potentially lucrative) collecting of Egyptianantiquities by the name of Sébastien-LouisSaulnier decided to obtain the Dendera “plani-sphere” for France. Saulnier had been Napoleon’spolice commissioner in Lyon as well as his prefectin both Tern-et-Garonne and the Aude. Thrownout of any official capacity during the Restoration,Saulnier occupied himself with literary andscientific matters, and became publisher of twoinfluential periodicals.

How lucky, Saulnier remarked, that the French

French engineers made this

drawing of the Dendera

zodiac still in place on the

temple ceiling, before it

was blasted out and

carted off to Paris. It was

published in 1809 in the

Description de l’Egypte,

complete with a goddess

and panels of hieroglyphs

that did not appear in

Denon’s sketch—nor,

ultimately, in the Louvre

(see page 29).


army under Napoleon had not taken down theDendera zodiac, for if they had “it would certainlyhave fallen into the hands of the English, like theRosetta inscription” (we will shortly return to thepurloined Rosetta stone). To realize his dream ofpossession, the patriotic Saulnier commissioned amaster mason of his acquaintance named JeanBaptiste Lelorrain to extract the monument fromits home. Special saws, jacks, and large scissorswere constructed, and Lelorrain left for Alexandriaearly in October 1820.

Lelorrain’s adventures in Egypt have a certainromantic air about them, if archaeological vandal-ism can be called romantic. To remove the zodiac,Lelorrain sawed, pulled, and eventually used gun-powder to explode the ceiling out of the temple.At the time this struck several scholars, such asJomard and the young Jean-François Champollion,as unconscionable. Today it would be both scien-tifically reprehensible and a likely violation ofinternational law. Yet Egypt had long beentreated by Europeans as a quarry for antiquities;many had been brought to Italy under the RomanEmpire. In the 19th century Britain, France, andeventually Germany competed with one anotheron many fronts, not least in the purloining ofantiquities. National pride, European disdain fornative inhabitants (nicely honed by centuries ofcolonial experience elsewhere), and pure avaricebrought many Egyptian artifacts to London, Paris,and Berlin. The Dendera zodiac, together withobelisks—such as the one visible today in thePlace de la Concorde—were among the first.Many justified the removals by arguing that theartifacts would simply have decayed or been de-stroyed in Egypt, which is not altogether true,since by the 1820s Egyptians had become increas-ingly aware of the remote past and were seeking toestablish their own museums.

Lelorrain and his loot arrived at Marseilles onSeptember 9, 1821. After quarantine (to avoid thevery real possibility of plague), the zodiac wasoffloaded on November 27. Almost at once “astranger” offered to buy it for a “considerablesum.” The patriotic Saulnier resisted. Early in1822 he wrote a little book intended, in part, todrum up government interest. After discussionsover where to put it, the zodiac went temporarilyto the Louvre, where it excited tremendous publicinterest. Salons bubbled with talk about theEgyptian stars, scholars renewed their interest,religious unease reemerged, and a comedy soonappeared in a Parisian playhouse. “Paris has azodiac from Dendera,” a line from the comedywent, “so Dendera should have a zodiac fromParis.” Dendera did one day have its zodiac fromParis, but not of Paris skies—a copy of its ownceiling eventually filled Lelorrain’s vacant space.Public pressure led Louis XVIII to pay Saulnierthe unprecedented sum of 150,000 francs for thezodiac, which was installed in the Royal Library.A good dinner in Paris at this time cost about 5

francs, so this was a huge amount, though Saulnierclaimed that he had been offered more by theunnamed stranger. In 1919 the zodiac moved tothe Egyptian collections of the Louvre, where itcan still be seen.

Comparing the ceiling in the Louvre (oppositepage) to the drawing in the Description on theprevious page, we see that Lelorrain’s sawn andexploded ceiling misses the goddess with out-stretched arms, as well as the panels to her left andright that are filled with hieroglyphs. If we lookclosely at the lower left panel by her foot, we cansee a hieroglyph drawn within an oval surround,called by the French soldiers a “cartouche” for itsresemblance to a cartridge case. Since these panelswere left behind at Dendera, and since Denonhimself had not drawn them, anyone interested inthe hieroglyphs had to rely entirely on theDescription’s print.

But the hieroglyphs could not be read, or theycouldn’t be until the summer after the zodiac’sarrival—the summer of that diner chez Laplacewhere the zodiac dominated conversation. In fact,Egyptian hieroglyphs had been under intenseinvestigation by an ardent young protégé ofFourier, Jean-François Champollion, a talentedrepublican pamphleteer and superb linguist whowas convinced that hieroglyphs could be under-stood only by someone who had knowledge of lifeas it was lived in ancient Egypt. These mutesymbols, he was certain, would speak only if theywere treated neither as cryptographic codes nor asmystical talismans. On September 22 Cham-pollion finished a letter to Bon-Joseph Dacier, thepermanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptionset Belles Lettres, where philology, linguistics, andantiquity increasingly mixed and merged with oneanother. That famous missive explained the essen-tial principles underlying hieroglyphs—that theyare fundamentally phonetic, with ideograms usedas well, some of the ideograms functioning as whatChampollion called “determinatives,” or unvoiced

To remove the zodiac,

Lelorrain sawed,

pulled, and eventually

used gunpowder to

explode the ceiling out

of the temple.


signs, which specify what the text is about.Determinatives provided an essential clue todecipherment, and they were what everyone elsehad missed.

Champollion’s was not the only attempt at thetime to read the mysterious symbols. The Englishpolymath Thomas Young had also tried his hand.Young approached hieroglyphs almost as thoughthey were a mathematical problem, an issue ofcryptographic understanding, and not as a scriptthat was bound to ancient Egyptian ways ofthinking. He had however made progress and wasthe first to suggest in writing that the symbolswere essentially phonetic. Both Young’s andChampollion’s work depended upon their use ofthe Rosetta stone, which contained the same textin formal hieroglyphs, in the popular Demotic (orwhat Young called “Encorial”)—a late Egyptianscript—and in Greek. Discovered by the Frenchearly in their expedition, the stone was taken fromthem (and from Egypt) by the British, when theFrench were forced to surrender a few years later.As it happens, not only was Young in Paris in thefall of 1822, but he also attended the very meetingof the Académie des Inscriptions at which Champol-lion’s letter to Dacier was read. This isn’t theplace to discuss the complex and increasinglyangry dispute between the partisans of Young andChampollion concerning the decipherment ofhieroglyphs. Suffice it to say that Young at firstthought of Champollion as a junior partner whowas following the trail that he had mapped out.Champollion had other ideas, and bitterness soongrew between the two.

Unfortunately for Young, this was the secondtime within a very short period that a juniorFrenchman had apparently bested him. By 1822the wave theory of light, which Young had devel-

oped and espoused two decades before, had beentaken to new mathematical and empirical heightsby Augustin Jean Fresnel. Though Young re-mained on friendly terms with Fresnel—in partbecause Fresnel was much more astute in handlingissues of priority than was the fiery Champol-lion—nevertheless, to have been displaced twiceby young Frenchmen, by citizens of a nation sorecently and thoroughly defeated by the English,was not altogether pleasant for the foreign secre-tary of the Royal Society of London.

The lines of patronage, national pride, andscientific politics twisted and turned around thesepeople. Champollion found support from FrançoisArago, who had been Fresnel’s major patron andyet a close friend of Young’s. Arago later dancednimbly around the conflicts in his obituary ofYoung. Arago was also close friends with Fourier,whose new theory of heat conduction he stronglysupported. That theory, indeed Fourier’s entireapproach to physics, had long been challenged byphysicists associated with Laplace, among whomwas Jean-Baptiste Biot. Biot and Arago dislikedone another intensely, since Arago felt, with somejustification, that Biot had muscled him aside adecade before in new optical discoveries thatArago had been the first to make. This hadproduced a vicious and very public spat betweenthe two.

In the spring of 1822, just before Champollion’sbreakthrough, both Champollion and Biotpublished papers on the dating of the Denderazodiac. Despite a comparatively friendly warningfrom Champollion, Biot, like Fourier and otherphysicists before him, persisted in treating thezodiac as though it were a direct image of nature,untouched by human understanding. He identi-fied what he took to be certain star patterns in it,applied precession, and arrived at a date of about800 B.C.E. Champollion, now deep into his workon hieroglyphs and approaching the moment offull understanding, warned Biot that the wholebusiness was suspect, but Biot persisted and wentinto print with his own astronomical datingscheme.

In a first irony, and this story has many, Biotlater criticized Fourier for an incorrect applicationof astronomy to the zodiac. This brings us back toour beginning, to the claims of Burckhardt andCoraboeuf. Recall that they had associated thezodiacs’ dates of production with the positions ofthe summer solstice among the constellations,which entailed that, despite precession, Sirius andthe solstice must remain about the same distancein time from one another during most of Egyptianhistory. Indeed they do, though it’s doubtful thatBurckhardt and Coraboeuf had thought itthrough. Because of Sirius’ position, and thelatitudes at which the Egyptians observed the sky,both Sirius’ heliacal rising and the summer solsticeremained nearly the same number of days apartthroughout Egyptian history even though the

The actual Dendera zodiac,

sans the surrounding

depictions shown in the

Descriptions de l’Egypte on

page 27, has been

exhibited in the Louvre

since 1919. The lower

image indicates the zodiac

figures in red.


zodiac moves slowly around the ecliptic. Fourier,a masterful mathematician but evidently a poorastronomer, just assumed that Sirius would behavelike a zodiacal star, making his calculationsinherently flawed. Biot did not hesitate to pointthis out.

Though Biot persisted in his dating schemes foryears, Champollion had already softened the forceof his calculations by quickly publishing a refu-tation. Biot had after all been warned. Cham-pollion’s argument seemed to be irrefutable, eventhough it altogether avoided any claims for thezodiac’s putative astronomical significance. ForChampollion saw the constellations—likehieroglyphs themselves—as an expression ofEgyptian culture. The zodiac was not a plani-sphere, he believed (correctly, as it turned out), butan astrological chart. In what soon proved to be amajor step along his route to the decipherment ofhieroglyphs, Champollion conceived that the starsdepicted on the Dendera ceiling referred not to theheavens themselves but to the graphic itself. Theywere in fact determinatives, put there to tell thereader that the graphic was about celestial eventsthat guide human destiny. The meaning ofEgypt’s stars could not be uncovered throughcalculations done under Paris skies.

How then did Champollion date the zodiac?What told him, as he asserted, that it certainlycould not have been made before the Alexandrianconquest, and that it more likely dated to the verylate period of Greco-Roman domination in the 1stcentury B.C.E.? The clue lay not in any image onthe purloined zodiac itself, but rather in the sidehieroglyphs that had been depicted only in thedrawing in the Description. At the lower left of thegoddess, the print displays a cartouche with(phonetic) signs that Champollion could nowpronounce as autocrator, which is the Greek wordfor dictator. What more could one ask? Dendera’sGrecian-era birth now seemed to be just as solidlyestablished as Champollion’s increasingly impres-

sive readings of hieroglyphs. (And the popeoffered the nonreligious Champollion acardinalship, even though he was married withthree children, for having salvaged biblicalchronology.)

Debate nevertheless did not end there. Somewere to argue that the ceiling might have beendesigned or built elsewhere and only then broughtto its later surrounds, which would still permit theextravagant antiquity that Jomard had insistedupon. Others, like Biot, rejected extreme age butpersisted in their astronomical games since, afterall, Champollion had not proven irrefutably thatthe stars could not have positional meaning. In factthey don’t, though the locations of planetary signsin particular constellations may perhaps be telling.Thomas Young himself perceived the folly ofhousing observations and calculations in the alienenvironment of words. “The French astronomersstill persist in amusing themselves” with theDendera zodiac, he wrote with evident sarcasmfrom Paris in late September 1822 to his friendWilliam Hamilton at Naples (British ministerplenipotentiary to the Neapolitan court).

Throughout the decade following Champollion’sdecipherment Parisian newspapers, salons, jour-nals, and institutional meetings brimmed withexchanges about zodiacs. Pamphlets appeared inprofusion, scholars attacked one another, andcharges of plagiarism were thrown about. Overtime the issue subsided, though it continued toerupt now and then. Years later, and especiallyafter the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s Origin ofSpecies, arguments for the youth of Egypt wereoccasionally bracketed with arguments againstevolutionary descent, each supporting the other.

In 1828 Champollion mounted an expedition toEgypt to see the ruins for himself. The expeditionarrived at Dendera in mid-November. Enteringthe part of the temple that had housed the circularzodiac, Champollion saw for the first time theempty space left by Lelorrain nearly a decadebefore. He saw something else as well. Turningto look at the surrounding hieroglyphs that had

The critical cartouche near the goddess’s foot in the

Descriptions drawing, whose hieroglyphics led Champollion

to the conclusion that Dendera dated from the Greco-

Roman era, turned out to be empty when Champollion

visited the temple in person.

The rising of Sirius, the

brightest star in the

heavens and important to

Egyptians as the signal for

the annual flooding of the

Nile, was assumed by the

French physicists to move

with relation to the sun as

do the constellations of

the zodiac. It does not,

however, as we see here.

The curved line dividing

the lit from the dark

regions represents the

horizon near Dendera. The

blue lines show the

locations of the ecliptic

with respect to the horizon

at five helical risings

separated by hundreds of

years. The vernal points

mark the equinoxes at

these times, and the

circled numbers on the

lower right indicate the

corresponding positions of

Sirius. Sirius remains

about the same distance

from the equinoxes—and

so from the solstices—

throughout these many

centuries, despite

precession.


not been sent to Paris, Champollion froze indismay. Every single cartouche was empty: therewere no hieroglyphs in them at all! The evidencehe had so successfully, and influentially, used todate Dendera simply did not exist. Years later thereason became clear. The ceiling had been con-structed during the interregnum between thedeath of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy Auletes in 51B.C.E., and the coregency officially established in42 with Caesarion, Cleopatra’s five-year-old son byJulius Caesar. Built during the interregnum, theDendera zodiac’s empty cartouches, like those ofevery monument constructed during that period,forever awaited royal names. In preparing theplates for publication of the Description, someenterprising draftsman had decided to fill theempty cartouches in the drawing with hieroglyphsfound in other drawings. How ironic that thisvery absence of hieroglyphs in the cartouches nowpermits the monument to be dated quite precisely.

Stepping back from the colorful details of theDendera affair, we can discern a difference amongFrench savants that became ever sharper as thecentury wore on, and that remains with us today.The heated arguments that engaged so manypeople for more than two decades raised thequestion of who was entitled to speak withauthority about antiquity. Was it to be physicistsand engineers, who had one view of evidence, orphilologists, linguists, and historians, who had arather different one? Philologists and linguists,such as the young Champollion, understood thezodiac to be the creation of ancient Egyptian life;it spoke to the beliefs by which Egyptians at theend of the pharaonic era guided their lives.Physicists like Fourier and Biot may have dis-agreed with one another over which of them couldbetter calculate the past, but both were convincedthat the Dendera ceiling was an image of theEgyptian sky essentially unstained by humanimagination. Even if it was imperfect, perhapsdistorted by the fancies of human imagination or

an ancient craftsman’s lack of skill in representa-tion, an image might nevertheless shine withevidentiary power just because it could be submit-ted to numbers, and in numbers alone lay truth.For words are imprecise things, and they havenatural truths only as distant and distortedancestors. Or so men like Fourier, Biot, andJomard thought. The siren song of calculationdeceived them. Al-Jabarti, the chronicler of theFrench invasion, might have warned themotherwise, for he knew that the sonorities andcadences of Arabic could sway the minds of men.Perhaps ancient Egyptians also beheld the worldin speech. And yet Champollion, correct thoughhe turned out to have been, and no friend ofnumbers, was deceived by the very absence ofwords he thought to be present. The mystery ofDendera was finally solved neither by numbers norby the sounds of words, but by a new kind ofhistorical understanding, one in which manyforms of evidence—linguistic, artistic, literary,and archaeological—were together weighed andconfronted with one another. There never was aRoyal Road to the Egypt of the pharaohs. ■

The heated arguments that engaged so many people for more than two decades

raised the question of who was entitled to speak with authority about antiq-

uity. Was it to be the physicists and engineers, who had one view of evidence,

or philologists, linguists, and historians, who had a rather different one?

Jed Z. Buchwald, the Doris and Henry DreyfussProfessor of History, came to Caltech in 2001, after 10years as the Dibner Professor of the History of Scienceand director of the Dibner Institute for the History ofScience and Technology at MIT. He earned his BA inhistory (1971) from Princeton, and his MA (1973)and PhD (1974) in the history of science from Har-vard. From 1974 to 1992 he was a member of theUniversity of Toronto faculty. Buchwald’s work focusesprimarily on the history of physics from the 17ththrough 19th centuries (he has written books on Hertzand electric waves and on Fresnel and wave optics) andon related issues in the philosophy of science. But he’salso interested in (and teaches courses in) the social andeconomic history of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.Buchwald was a MacArthur Fellow from 1995 to 2000.

PICTURE CREDITS:20 – Réunion des MuséesNationaux/Art Resource,NY; 21 – Giraudon/ArtResource, NY

egyptian stars under paris skies

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