Album du Musée de Boulaq, comprenant quarante planches photographiées par MM. Délié et Béchard, avec un texte explicatif

Exceptionally rare first edition of this remarkable photographic album, printed in Cairo by Mourès & Cie, the press operated by Antoine Mourès. Produced under the direction of Auguste Mariette, it constitutes the first illustrated photographic catalogue of the Boulaq Museum, the first Egyptian museum devoted to Pharaonic antiquities and the direct predecessor of the present Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The work comprises forty albumen prints (approximately 24.5 × 18 cm), mounted on heavy card leaves hinged on guards. Each photograph is accompanied by a printed descriptive leaf - with the exception of plates 4 and 11, which are accompanied by two - the photographs being mounted on the versos of the leaves and the corresponding printed descriptions on the rectos.

Contemporary half brown shagreen, spine with five raised bands, decorated with blind-tooled panels and gilt fleurons, covers with blind-tooled interlaced borders, title gilt to the upper cover, white moiré silk endleaves, gilt edges. Minor rubbing to the spine and joints, spine ends slightly compressed, restorations to the spine and at the head of one joint, occasional foxing internally and to the silk endleaves.

In his preface, dated 1 November 1871, Auguste Mariette himself recounts the genesis of the undertaking. Having settled in Cairo in 1869, the photographers Hippolyte Délié and Émile Béchard sought his permission to photograph the monuments displayed in the galleries of the Boulaq Museum, which he had founded. Mariette granted them access to the collections and personally selected the objects to be included in the album. Their arrangement - religious, funerary, civil, historical, Greek and Roman monuments - follows that of the concise guidebook distributed to visitors at the museum entrance. The work was thus conceived, in Mariette's own words, to become « comme un catalogue illustré du Musée » ["as an illustrated catalogue of the Museum"], intended alike for travellers, scholars and artists.

Délié and Béchard rank among the leading Orientalist photographers active in Egypt during the 1870s, alongside Antonio Beato and Hippolyte Arnoux. Their partnership, which lasted from 1869 to 1873, produced a substantial part of the earliest photographic record of the Boulaq Museum. The present copy bears the date 1871 on its title page, whereas the two copies preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France are dated 1872, the two imprint dates coexisting in the bibliographical history of the work.

A rare first edition produced under the direct supervision of Auguste Mariette, this remarkable album marks the beginnings of photography in the service of Egyptology and of public museum collections.