As the first major photographic survey of monuments and archeological sites throughout Egypt and the Middle East and the most ambitious photographically illustrated book yet produced, Maxime Du Camp’s Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie delighted European audiences. Traveling down the Nile with his friend the writer Gustave Flaubert, Du Camp made pictures emphasizing descriptive clarity and a romanticized sense of Egypt as a lost civilization and a root of Western culture. The lone human depicted throughout Du Camp’s photographs is his boatman and assistant, Hajj Ishmael, ostensibly posed to provide a sense of scale.