The volumes in the description de l'egypt compiled the research of the commission of arts and sciences established by napoleon during his egyptian campaign at the beginning of the nineteenth-century. The goal of the experts was to catalogue all of egyptian society past and present. They drew and analyzed the ancient egyptian monuments, presenting them both as they appeared in the present and as the french experts imagined they once looked. The project was to be an application of the methods of the enlightenment philosophe's encylopedia to egypt,. The work suggests that contemporary egyptian society is unable to care for its own antiquities or even to understand them. For that, an advanced civilization is needed, one armed with science. The description proclaims france's faith that it is producing a description which is also a history, not just a catalogue but an analysis of the inner workings of egypt's history, the ways this civilization's rise and decline exactly parallels the erection and decay of its monuments.