Calamity in Cairo: The fire that caused extensive damage to one of Egypt’s most important collections of historical manuscripts
Just before Christmas 2011 the cultural world was rocked by the devastating news that Cairo’s Institut d’Égypte had been ravaged by fire. The repository of over 200,000 antique volumes and ancient manuscripts, many gathered by the original French savant scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s invasion in 1798, the Institute was the oldest of its kind in Egypt and the Middle East. That is until a protester’s Molotov cocktail flew through a window on December 17th.
The riots with government forces in central Cairo began with the ruling army’s failure to establish a greater level of democracy than under the oppressive Mubarak regime. The Egyptian army has cracked down with an internationally condemned savagery, assaulting protesters in the streets, escalating public frustration and violence. The Institute became the latest victim of this civil strife: a group of protesters, since denounced as ‘thugs’ by Egyptian commentators, were engaged in a missile exchange with soldiers outside the Shura council building in Qasr al-Aini Street when one of them lobbed a petrol bomb and hit the Institute in nearby Sheikh Rihan Street. This cost Egypt nearly 170,000 works of its priceless cultural heritage.
As the blaze took hold protesters and soldiers alike ran into the burning building to rescue what they could while the fire brigade fought its way through the anarchy of the Cairo streets, only to arrive far too late. In the end some 30-40,000 works were saved. However the toll was heavy: the Atlas of Lower and Upper Egypt of 1752 is gone, as is the Atlas of the Old Indian Arts and the Atlas Handler, a German publication of 1842 from Muhammad Ali’s collection, thought to be the only remaining copy in the world. The most lamented casualty, however, was the unparalleled work of Napoleon’s savants themselves: Cairo’s own copy of the gigantic 20-volume Description de l’Égypte went up in flames.
Although founded by Europeans during the 18th-century Enlightenment, the institute is a listed Islamic and Coptic monument. With perhaps a fitting sense of history, or irony, the first action of the minister of antiquities, Muhammad Ali Ibrahim, was to contact the French ambassador in Cairo to seek French aid in restoring the damaged building.
‘This crime was planned by saboteurs,’ insisted Ibrahim. ‘Every Egyptian saw them on satellite TV, setting fire to the ground floor of the building.’ Nehal Abdel-Aati, a 20-year-old faculty of engineering student, said: ‘The people who did this cannot be described as revolutionaries, who would never do anything so unethical. They can’t even be described as Egyptians, as they want to tell the world that Egypt has no place for knowledge,’ she added.
The Description was published over two decades from 1809-29 and comprises images of such detail that the book remains unique in publishing history. It was so large that a special printing press had to be built to produce its pages. It was the first example of Egyptian treasures presented to Europe, consisting of the results of the savants’ three-year mission for Napoleon to document and record everything they saw throughout the ancient country, from Nile amphibians to the Rosetta Stone.