“Views in Egypt,” by Luigi Mayer

Earlier I came across a twitter post by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, referencing a book unknown to me.  The book title is “Views in Egypt, from the original drawings in the possession of Sir Robert Ainslie, taken during his embassy to Constantinople by Luigi Mayer” and printed in London in 1801.

The volume may be found at Archive.org here.  The 10mb PDF is useless, however, as the pictures have been compressed to the point of destruction.  But the original images of the pages are also downloadable, although the zip file is 2Gb in size.

The text is not interesting.  The images are not especially interesting either, in truth!  But I did see this one, between pages 14 and 15, of the two largest pyramids at Giza.

The figures in all the illustrations are clearly stylised and added in the studio.

What makes this image interesting is the mound reaching up the side of the Great Pyramid, right up to the huge gash in one side.  Today that damage is in mid-air.  But here we see that this is the residue of attempts to take stone from it, for building purposes in Cairo.  The mound was heaped up to facilitate this.

There are quite a number of images of Alexandria.  The drawings were taken while Egypt was still under Mameluke rule, before the coming of Mohammed Ali, and the beginning of modernisation.