National Geographic Daily News has a selection of photographs taken in the aftermath of the fire at Cairo’s nineteenth-century Institut d’Egypte. “It wasn’t very comfortable, because there was no air conditioning, and the projection facilities weren’t ideal. But just to be there – it was really hallowed ground,” commented Willeke Wendrich of the University of […]

Violence in Cairo set fire to the Institute d’Egypte, a research center founded by Napoleon Bonaparte in the late eighteenth century. The institute housed more than 190,000 books, including handwritten descriptions of Egypt’s monuments by French scholars. Volunteers are sifting through the debris, looking for items that can be saved. “The burning of such a […]