PARIS: If Egyptian head of state Hosni Mubarak is a regular visitor to Paris to lunch with President Jacques Chirac and discuss the international peace conference on the Middle East peace, which both wish to hold in the French capital, it’s undoubtedly because the city of Paris happens to be one of the world’s most eloquent hymns to Egyptian culture.

The city is undoubtedly the world capital of Egyptomania, the phenomenon so well described by Robert Sole, a French journalist (who is an editor of Le Monde), himself born in Egypt, in a seminal work — Egypt, a French Passion (Editions du Seuil 1997).

According to his work, Egypt would not be the Egypt we know today, nor would Paris be Paris as it is, if the two countries had not experienced the two centuries old love affair that got its start with the arrival on the banks of the Nile of Napoleon Bonaparte, much of whose glory — also his decline — is associated with the country, Egypt, which, “was forced to start dreaming in French because of the arrival of the British army of occupation.”

Paris rather significantly, largely as a result of the interest shown by Bonaparte, counts among its monuments and treasures some of the most remarkable artefacts associated with ancient Egypt — notably the magnificent obelisk from Luxor situated on the Place de la Concorde, on the very spot where King Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793, but also the Musee du Louvre, which has one of the richest collections of Egyptiana in the world, whose principal entrance, takes the form of an all-glass Egyptian pyramid.

Quite appropriately, the most current manifestation of France’s particular brand of Egyptomania takes the form of a magnificent special exhibition presently being hosted by the Louvre on the ‘Everyday Life of Egyptian Artists under the Pharaohs’, an exhibition that has already been visited by millions of visitors.

Guillemette Andreu-Lanoe is the 53-year old commissioner at the Musee du Louvre, who came up with the idea for the rather unusual exhibition.

Mrs Andreu-Lanoe says that it’s not for anything that her approach to Egyptology has often been labelled as frivolous.

As one of the country’s best-known Egyptologists, Mrs Andreu-Lanoe lost no time in gathering together some 350 pieces, all from Deir-el-Medineh, the village — located between the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens — where lived 3000 years ago the “men of the tomb,” the artisans responsible for building the tombs of the Pharaohs.

Such exhibits, notes Anne-Marie Romero, French daily Le Figaro’s cultural correspondent, “usually limit themselves to Gods, tombs, and Kings.” This one, she reports, “speaks to us in a simple fashion of one of the largest archaeological sites of ancient Egypt, a miracle of sorts, and of the way men, women and children lived and worked there during 450 years.”

And the people in question who are at the center of the exhibition are not ordinary everyday man-in-the-street, rather the architects, sculptors, painters, scribes, indeed the quarry-men who carved out the blocks of stone from the earth, who devoted their lives to constructing the monuments where eventually they would repose, supposedly forever, in peace.

One of the tombs that was not completed, that of Horemheb, in the Valley of the Kings, is at the center of the Louvre exhibition and provides a startling look into how the artists and artisans in question went about preparing and constructing the monuments with which today Egypt is largely associated.

Mrs Andreu-Lanoe’s exhibition also provides an exceptional background to a series of lectures that will take place during the run of the show — which will bring to Paris some of the world’s leading Egyptologists.