Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds | |
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| Born | (1799-11-23)23 November 1799 Lorient, France |
| Died | 9 July 1883(1883-07-09) (aged 83) |
| Citizenship | France |
| Occupation | Engineer |
| Known for | Suez Canal |
| Awards | Title of Pasha |
Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds better known asLinant Pasha (Lorient, France, 23 November 1799 – Cairo 9 July 1883) was an explorer of Egypt and, as the chief engineer of Egypt's public works, 1831–1869, an influential engineer of theSuez Canal. He is listed as a founder of theSuez Canal Company.
Having taken advantage of a sound education that emphasized mathematics, drawing and painting, then having been given some experience at sea through the efforts of his father, Antoine-Marie, a naval officer, charting the coastal waters of Newfoundland, in 1814, aged fifteen. Having passed his entrance exams, young Linant embarked as a naval cadet on the frigateCléopâtre, engaged on a mission to Greece, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, which he spent making drawings and doing relief mapping. One of the artists attached to the expedition having suddenly died, Linant was commissioned to replace him, drawing sites and ruins inAthens,Constantinople,Ephesus,Akka andJerusalem. AtJaffa the expedition reached Damiatta by camel caravan, then sailed up the Nile to disembark atCairo in December. The expedition was completed, but Linant decided not to return to France, and through a recommendation from the comte de Forbin, the expedition's director, briefly entered the service of the viceroy of Egypt,Muhammad Ali, before setting out on a series of explorations that lasted from 1818 to 1830, which he described later in hisMémoires.
In 1818–19, he was in lower Nubia, beyond theCataracts of the Nile. In 1820, he joined the expedition of the French consul general and explorerBernardino Drovetti to the oasis ofSiwa in theLibyan Desert, where theoracle of Ammon had been consulted byAlexander the Great but to which no modern European had penetrated; his drawings illustrated theVoyage à l'Oasis de Syouah, published by E. Jomard (1823). Within a few months he travelled with the Italian Alessandro Ricci toSinai: the party left Cairo and followed the peninsula's eastern coast, passing through theWells of Moses,Wadi Gharandel andKhazne Firaoun, to arrive atMaghara, where they made copies of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. Their intention to reachPetra was foiled by the insecurity of the area, but in returning to Cairo they passed throughSarbout el-Khadem and sketched its monuments. This first trip to Sinai enabled him to establish contacts with theBedouin and prepare himself for the successful trip to Petra finally undertaken with Léon de Laborde in 1828.
Meantime he visited theFayum in 1821, then was sent by the EnglishmanWilliam John Bankes to theSudan commissioned to get geographical information and draw the monuments there. He was gone from Cairo thirteen months from June 1821, discovering the ruins atMessaourat and atNaqa, only slightly in advance of Frédéric Cailliaud, the first European to reachMeroe.
In 1824, Linant spent a couple of months in London, where the African Company proposed to support him in a voyage of exploration, as they had supported Burckhardt. After further travels in Nubia and Sudan, in 1827 he set out funded by the Association, to make his way as far up theWhite Nile as could be, in search of the fabledsource of the Nile: tribal hostility forced him back at 13 degrees north latitude. In 1831 theSociété de Géographie of Paris commissioned a further attempt, which was postponed by the viceroy, who sent him instead to find the gold mines inAtbai.
In these travel Linant did not completely lose sight of his early experience in hydrology. In the Sinai in 1822 he had noted the traces ofTrajan's canal, and had visitedSuez and the peninsula's other lakes, and later he had roamed theEastern Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. "In 1827 and 1828" he wrote later, "I returned once more to the Isthmus, which I visited once again and its environs, and it was then that I began the first studies of a project of communication between the two seas." These projects he discussed with Laborde as they recrossed the peninsula on the way to Petra in 1828. There is a valley in the Sinai, once his contracts with the African Association were successfully terminated, Linant "passed more than a year alone with a choice library in order to study seriously and without distractions in order to acquire what I lacked in scientific understanding to take up service with the Egyptian government in the character of an engineer."
At his return to Cairo in 1831, Linant was named chief engineer of the public works of Upper Egypt, a position that associated him in a long and fruitful career with most of the great works of modernizing Egypt's network of irrigation canals, the grand levées along the Nile. By 1837, fully in charge of public works in the Ministry of Public Instruction, he received the title ofbey.
All along, the idea of a communication between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea never left him. From 1830, he was expressing his ideas, first with the consul general of France, then withFerdinand de Lesseps. In 1841, he submitted a preliminary plan for a canal to the Compagnie Péninsulaire et Orientale and in 1844, set before Lesseps his complete plans. In 1854 Lesseps obtained from the viceroyMuhammad Sa'id thefirman for the canal concession on behalf of theCompagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez,[1] and Linant was named chief engineer, in which capacity he was soon assisted by the French hydraulics engineer Mougel, for Linant continued in charge of public works, as director general (1862), as Minister of Public Works (1869) and member of the viceroy's council.
He retired in 1869 to write his vast memoir. He was elected an International Member of theAmerican Philosophical Society.[2] In June 1873, the viceroy conferred upon him the title ofpasha. He died leaving a vast accumulation of notes, memoirs, drawings, most of which remain unedited. A great number of visiting Europeans left their impressions of Linant.
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