Among the Louvre Museum's collection was a Dendera Zodiac. Napoleon's army had once come here, but they had not taken it away. Denon, the director of the Louvre Museum, sketched it, just as he had sketched many Egyptian antiquities.
Sometimes he copied things in the middle of battle, nearly getting himself captured. At the time, the French expeditionary force's warships had been sunk, and they had no idea how to transport so many artifacts back.
Tomb robbers generally slipped into graves under cover of night and silently took a few valuable items. It was the later "archaeologists," however, who blasted the zodiac down and brought it back to Europe.
Dorothy had said her home was in a museum, and she had not been wrong. "Moving house" meant relocating an entire building, brick by brick, from where it was discovered to the discoverer's home, leaving behind nothing but the foundation.
Ali Pasha truly was illiterate. As the territory under his control in Egypt expanded, so did the areas Europeans could explore. Sometimes he issued a few permits to give antiquities dealers "a little convenience," while they asked their partners in European museums to return the favor to the Pasha.
Ibrahim, unlike his father, did not consider himself an Albanian or an Ottoman. He believed himself to be Egyptian, and the army he led had been Egyptianized, from its officers down to its soldiers. These former Egyptian peasants, trained by French officers, could likewise drive back the Ottoman Empire's troops, who extorted people everywhere.
Many French veterans lived worse lives than these "advisers" who had remained abroad. During Herbert Hoover's administration, many veterans of World War I did not even have a place to live. They could only build shabby "houses" out of planks and tarpaulins, and for a time, the grand