Description

This beautiful Art Deco style road map of Egypt depicts the entire country and delineates all railways, highways, local roads, desert trails, waterways and aerodromes; giving distances between key points.  Lower Egypt (with Alexandria and Cairo) and the Lower Nile Valley are detailed in the main map while insets variously showcase Upper Egypt all the way to Aswan; Suez; as well as the entire country in overview.

The map was drafted by Alexandere Nicohosoff, an engineer and the proprietor of the Establissement des Arts Graphique, one of Egypt’s leading publishers of maps and guides from around 1920 to 1950.  During this era, Alexandria was one of the most fashionable and cosmopolitan cities in the world, the haunt of writers, adventurers and business magnates.

The present map was made in the first half of World War II, when Egypt (a British Protectorate) was fighting off a German invasion led by General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrikakorps.  At the climax of the harrowing Western Desert Campaign, the British Allied armies under Generals Harold Alexander and Bernard Montgomery decisively defeated the Germans at the Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October 23 – November 11, 1942), saving Egypt for the remainder of the war.

The present map is scare.  We can locate only 2 institutional examples, at the Library of Congress and the University of Otago Library (Dunedin, New Zealand).

References: Library of Congress: G8301.P2 1942 / OCLC: 840859426 / 235953733.