Jed Z. Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz meticulously reconstruct the complicated early nineteenth-century backstory of French scholarly and popular debate over a handful of Egyptian zodiacs. Although these ancient zodiacs may first appear to be ‘obscure artifacts’ (p. 1) brought to France by dubious means from Upper Egypt, Buchwald and Josefowicz demonstrate how and why issues of astronomy and the dating of antiquities could be closely related to pressing questions of governance and authority.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sacred chronologers dated the Noachian Flood to somewhere between 2,500 and 2,300 BCE. As Buchwald and Josefowicz show, Charles Dupuis's systematic analysis of the zodiac in terms of the seasonal agricultural cycles suggested a much earlier date for its creation, at odds with the universal destruction of civilization as depicted in the biblical account of the deluge. By ‘assimilating the figurative characters of the constellations to the rhythms of planting and sowing, [Dupuis] could use precession to date the origins of both agriculture and the zodiac’ (p. 55), counting back from where the constellations fell in his own day to where he thought their greatest agricultural significance lay, which he believed should date their moment of first naming. Although Dupuis initially refrained from giving an actual age for the invention of the zodiac, his mapping of the summer solstice to Capricorn implied that the zodiac pre-dated by perhaps as much as nine thousand years the date given by sacred chronologers for creation of the Earth itself.

Following the Revolution, in his 1795 Origines de tous les cultes, Dupuis made bolder claims, dismissing his earlier suggestion that the rate of precession might have been disrupted by the Noachian Flood itself, and directly challenging biblical chronology and religious authority more generally. As Buchwald and Josefowicz indicate, such astronomically based claims should be read alongside the contemporaneous and growing body of geologic evidence that also argued for a much older date of the Earth.

As we know, however, not all political winds of early nineteenth-century France supported anticlerical positions. As Buchwald and Josefowicz demonstrate, biblical chronology regained prominence precisely when religious authorities were able to reassert a political role, and during these years zodiacal dating re-emerged as the site of heated contest. Although Bonaparte's short-lived occupation of Egypt (1798–1801) proved a military failure, consolation was found in the study and passionate popularization of Egyptian antiquities. In the first years of the nineteenth century, as Napoleon transitioned from first consul to emperor, and again in the 1820s under the restoration of the monarchy, reports, sketches and engravings of Egyptian zodiacs, and then the massive sandstone blocks of the Dendara zodiac itself, circulated through Paris and ignited a ‘cultural blaze’ (p. 239).

Astronomers, mathematicians and philologists, in and around Paris's leading scientific institutes, saw both technical challenges and high-profile means to further their careers and personal feuds in the reading and dating of the zodiacs. Buchwald and Josefowicz give illuminating intellectual and personal portraits of figures like Dupuis, Denon, Jollois, Devilliers, Fourier, Biot, Cuvier and Paravey. In changing political periods, Buchwald and Josefowicz convincingly demonstrate that the zodiacs drew added attention because ‘Egypt provided a rich lode of social, political, and religious ideas that did not always trigger the press censorship exercised by the Ministry of the Interior’ (p. 239).

In dating any of the Egyptian zodiacs through astronomical claims, one had to begin with a series of assumptions, starting with the identification of the key symbols to pull out from the dense bas-relief imagery. Even once symbols had been selected, however, further choices ensued: how to map those symbols onto various astronomical figures or events, and what to make of their relative dispersal on the zodiacs. The possibilities, as Buchwald and Josefowicz show in rich detail, were many, from identifying which symbols should be read as the equinox (and then as spring or autumnal), to determining in which direction the rectangular zodiac should be read at all. Those who agreed on the deep antiquity of the zodiacs, and therefore Egyptian civilization, could nevertheless disagree on the dating of a given zodiac by several thousand years.

That certain sketches circulating in Paris reversed the direction of parts of a rectangular zodiac did not help matters, but probably did not hinder them much either given the ways in which the zodiacs were so often used to confirm prior beliefs. In a wonderful final chapter on Jean-François Champollion, Buchwald and Josefowicz reveal the way another error in the drawings which circulated in France led him to correctly date the Dendara zodiac to Roman times, but for largely faulty reasons.

More important, however, than their insights into the dangers of overanalysing ‘evidence’, a danger today just as it was in the nineteenth century, is the attention to detail and method that Buchwald and Josefowicz bring to their studies of figures like Denon, Fourier, Jollois, Devilliers and Champollion. These chapters are remarkably dense – individuals were not separated by six degrees but rather seemed to have had six separate routes of connection – but the reward for the reader is an intimate portrait of complicated men and the state of descriptive geometry, draughtsmanship, astronomy, mathematical virtuosity, instrumentation and philology in these decades.

Convincingly, theirs is a story played out in Paris with its focus much more on the French dissemination and reception of observations and artefacts taken during the short-lived French occupation of Egypt than on the occupation itself, or on Egypt. Through the circulation of visual representations and overlapping and conflicting interpretations of ancient Egyptian zodiacs, Buchwald and Josefowicz reanimate the tumultuous politics and ever-shifting landscape of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century France and give us a rich view of this period's ongoing grapplings with the proper roles and limits of historical, scientific and religious evidence and argumentation.