AS mentioned last week, Egypt has two institutes that have a special collection of maps. These are the National Library of Egypt “Dar el-Kotob” and the Egyptian Geographic Society. Last week, the collection of Dar el Kotob was highlighted. This week we are exploring that of the Egyptian Geographic Society.
A prominent landmark of modem Egypt, the Egyptian Geographical Society is the second oldest non-governmental institution after “L’Institut d’Egypte” that was founded by the French Expedition to Egypt in 1798.
It was established as “La Societe Khedivale de Geographie”, by decree of the ruler of Egypt, Khedive Ismail on May 19th. 1875, who appointed a prominent German scientist and explorer Prof. George Schweinfurth as its first president, in the objective of promoting geographical knowledge and fostering geographi¬cal surveys in the different regions of Egypt such as the Egyptian deserts and the Sinai Peninsula as well as in many of the unexplored areas of Africa and the Upper Nile. .
The society houses one of Egypt’s largest cartographic collections, more than 15.000 maps and 300 atlases. King Fouad I and other members of the royal family donated to the society many of their own maps. The collection of maps varies from rare and historic maps to contemporary ones. A large number of those cover the Egyptian territory and date back to the 17th and 18th centuries, while many others depict the Nile Basin and the African continent. Additionally, there are copies of maps made by the Egyptian military war authority; such as a Darfur map drawn by Bordi Pasha, another large map drawn by Mahmoud AI-Falaki Pasha, and Gordon Pasha’s map of the Nile.
The series of maps, depicting the Mediterranean coasts prepared by the British admiralty in 1862, are also complete. Several classi¬cal atlases contain the narration of the social and geographical development of Egypt, for example the encyclopedic work pub¬lished by Prince Youssef Kamal, entitled “Monumenta Cartographica’ that comprises 14 volumes and traces the history of both Egypt and Africa since their earliest cartographic representa¬tion. Among the collection is the 1893 Atlas of Khedive Abbas II that includes a series of maps for the coastlines from Alexandria to Abu Qir in the first volume, and Damietta to Burullus in the sec¬ond; in addition to another historical atlas dating back to 1912, with 92 maps illustrating Lower Egypt, and 93 maps for Upper Egypt, all drawn to the scale 1 :50000.
The Centre for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) is collaborating with this prestigious institution to digitise this cartographic heritage in order to make available these resources to scholars and researchers, by enabling electronic consultation and reproduction, both online and in situ, while preserving the original copies from handling.
