COBI Campagne d'Égypte Set 20092

COBI's Campagne d'Égypte is a diorama built from 243 blocks, over 20 cm of Nile valley with a date palm and desert panorama, three figures and a horse: General Jean-Baptiste Kléber, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard, and a Mamluk cavalryman. A printed model of the Rosetta Stone is included, along with a plaque. No stickers.

The stone France found and lost

Bouchard was an engineer officer rebuilding a crumbling fort near Rosetta in July 1799 when his men turned up a slab of granodiorite carrying the same decree in three scripts — hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. Because the Greek could be read, the other two could finally be cracked.

France never got to keep it. When the Army of the East surrendered in 1801, the British took the stone under the terms of the capitulation and it has been in the British Museum ever since. But the French had already made ink impressions and plaster casts and sent them home — and it was from those copies, not the stone, that Jean-François Champollion worked out the hieroglyphic system in 1822. The expedition lost the object and kept the discovery.

Napoleon had taken 167 scholars to Egypt alongside the army. Their survey ran to a twelve-volume work and effectively created the discipline of Egyptology, which outlasted every military result of the campaign.

In the COBI range

Part of the Napoleonic Wars series, alongside the Borodino diorama (20091), French artillery (20093) and the figure sets (20094, 20098).

Specifications

Pieces: 243 · Figures: 3 with one horse · Age: 6+
Model dimensions: 22 × 9.5 × 12 cm (8.7 × 3.7 × 4.7 in)