ABSTRACT
The French Expedition to Egypt in 1798 is consistently cited as the event that opened Egypt, and ultimately the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, to Western intellectual influences. Napoleon Bonaparte's absconding had not torn meaning and purpose from their being in Egypt, as it had the military's, and they immersed themselves in their monumental pursuit of capturing the whole of Egypt in word, sketch and specimen. In preparation for the Egyptian campaign, Gaspard Monge returned to Italy, confiscated the Arabic font from the Vatican's printing office and enlisted typesetters to join the expedition. The Egyptian version was in every sense a research center, whose single but vast subject of inquiry was the country itself. Troops lived among the populace and went unarmed through the streets and bazaars, feeling themselves among a friendly people, which the Egyptians were, then as now, though not overly much to military occupiers.
