Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The online Description of Egypt

I can't believe myself seriously , this is a treasure I found by accident , I don't know why on heaven and earth they did not announce it more publicly

The Bibliotheca Alexandria opened a website that includes the magnificent encyclopedia of the Description of Egypt "Le Description de l' Egypte" online  for free ,

The whole original book in French with the complete set of text and wonderful graphics about the history of Egypt

I believe some of you may not be familiar with "Le Description de l' Egypte" ,mes amis c'est un francais grand livre ,sorry my friends this was a great French book made by the scientists and researchers who came with Napoleon's expedition about modern and ancient Egypt

This book was the first in the modern age to describe Egypt whether its history ,its ancient history , we are talking here about the first nucleus of the Egyptology or its society , the society of that time , the French were very interested in the Egyptian life at that time when they came , it was like a new world to them

The Marvelous  of the book was not in the detailed description only but the detailed illustrated description , there were no cameras but there were great artists who captured the tiniest thing you can imagine in this country with a sharp eyes

The customs and traditions, the buildings ,the people , the measurements of the buildings ,even the customs people wear across Egypt ,women,men and children

Till now these illustrations of that great book are used in post cards and in large painting they are fabulous

My late Grand father knew the man who had translated it from French to Arabic , late Zohair El-Shayeb , who had spent all his life to bring it to the Arabic reader, you will be surprised to know that he did it on his own without the help of the culture ministry, in fact he published it himself and even today his widow and daughters have their own publishing house , I forgot to say that the state did not honor this man except when he died I guess

anyhow this website is really great and you must visit it , of course the bad thing is that the text of the book is in French , well it is the original ,there is no direct translation

I want you to see the Plate volumes ,to see the wonderful illustrations

Anyhow here is the English translation of the book below the link , you must have this book ,I already got several editions from the Arabic translated books

Link to (¯`Description de l’Egypte Digital Collection`¯)

8 comments:

  1. I see the site, it's useless. The scanned images and pages is poor. Zoom is useless. I couldn't read from the site directly. I have to download every page as PDF... offfffff!!!

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  2. I am with you that it is not the best thing ,in fact I don't like the idea of Flash as it takes alot of time but it is better than nothing

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  3. Thanks Zeinobia for the link, it's amazing
    3ala fekra, the zooming works fine, I just had to wait for a while for it to load.

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  4. you welcome Nousha,yes it takes alot of timeu unfortunately

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  5. i found the DVD version in the following link, but need to download 3.7 Gigabyte :(

    http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/Description_de_Egypte.html

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  6. @anonymous ,oh my goodness,this is one hell of a book

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  7. @anonymous, I forget to say that this is one hell of a big ebook to download !!

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  8. ha ha this site rubbish

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