Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

28 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTThe locals had incorporated some stonework with the hieroglyphs still engravedinto them into the gates of the bazaars. 8The French officers concurred in the disappointment expressed by the scientists.Captain Moiret lamented that nothing remained in Alexandria of its ancientmonuments save Pompey’s Column and two obelisks of Cleopatra, one ofwhich had already fallen to the ground. “I sat on it and walked along it,” he reported.We now know that most of ancient Alexandria had fallen into the sea becauseof earthquakes and that the disappearance of the classical city had nothingto do with civilizational decadence. Among other beginnings visible in theFrench assault, we can see the birth of modern Egyptian tourism. Moiret wasseeking an ancient Alexandria, and thus was dissatisfied with the bustling, Arabicspeaking,Muslim port that exported so much Egyptian grain and other goods toAnatolia and even to Europe. Talleyrand’s interest in the sugar plantations ofBengal and the Antilles suggests that the French elite was primarily interested insuch commodities, and that they also believed it was dangerous to allow theBritish to enjoy surplus profits from tropical cash crops while France was deprivedof these extra sources of wealth. Cleopatra and past greatness had little todo with the reasons for which French troops now crawled all over Alexandria.Moiret gave his impressions of the Alexandrians. He thought their “constitution”robust, and so did not find them sickly, and he remarked their “bronzecolor,” though noting that “many are black or mulatto.” He was a severe critic,however, of their fashion sense. The peasants, he maintained, often went naked.As for urban folk, “Their clothing is a few rags thrown bizarrely over their bodies,and on their heads is chiffon rolled up like a swallow’s nest, which they call aturban. They wear neither hat nor shoes.” 9 Moiret was most scathing about thecommon women and complained of the way their poverty created immodestyeven as they attempted to veil their faces.Not all French officers were as dismissive of Egyptian women as Moiret,the former seminarian, was. His allegation, that women were zealous about veilingbut careless about letting slip a glimpse of their charms, concerned lowermiddle-classurban women, who were presumably attempting to emulate theveiling practices of the upper-class Ottoman-Egyptians but did not have enoughmoney to afford blouses that would guarantee their modesty. Not all socialclasses veiled in the premodern Middle East. Peasant and Bedouin women seldomhad the luxury of worrying about full veiling and seclusion, since they performedkey work outside for their social groups.The images of Egyptian women that Moiret derived from his early experiencesin Egypt take on a gritty, realistic texture very distant from woolgathering