Unknown · 1929
The reviewer praises the workmanship of the Survey of Egypt's 1928 Atlas of Egypt, compiled, drawn, and printed in Egypt for the International Geographical Congress at Cambridge, and credits H. Sirry Bey, in charge since 1927, and his collaborators. John Ball's general and orographical maps incorporate fifteen years of increased desert knowledge gained largely through motor transport. They show motor communications and recent exploratory routes, Gebel Owenat, and the Qattara Depression; the relief map reserves green for arable land and uses brown and gray for desert above and below sea level. The reviewer highlights detailed geological mapping of Sinai by W. F. Hume and O. H. Little, and L. J. Sutton's meteorological coverage extending to the Central African lakes, including six weather-type maps. The population-density map is judged exceptionally effective. Economic maps and diagrams compiled by F. S. Richards, with text by J. I. Craig, show the close correspondence between population density and agricultural value, the concentration of cotton cultivation in the middle delta, and substantial areas cropped twice annually.
Karen Culcasi; James R. Akerman · 2017
The chapter treats the 1928 Atlas of Egypt as the first major cartographic project after nominal independence, produced by the Survey of Egypt with the Ministry of Public Works and Finance: thirty-one color plates covering the whole country, with the general map at 1:2,000,000, orographic maps at 1:1,000,000 and a population map at 1:500,000, divided into five sections prepared by different departments whose style, scope, scale, symbols, place names and borders visibly differ. The author reads it as a nation-building project that asserts a demarcated national territory and uses the monarchy's coat of arms on the green-and-gold cover, while noting that it carries no nationalist or independence rhetoric; its 1928 unveiling at the International Geographical Congress in Cambridge served to show that Egypt could carry out an extensive scientific mapping project. She argues the same project documents a continuing neocolonial relationship: the text is entirely in English, the editor Hussein Sirry Bey had been surveyor general for one year, and the principal cartographers (John Ball, W. F. Hume, O. H. Little, L. J. Sutton) were British, with the binder Mohammed Amin Bahat Bay the only other Egyptian credited; the atlas marks areas suited to industrial development and plantation cotton while omitting water resources and local agriculture. She cites Eugene Van Cleef's 1929 review calling it "a delightful piece of workmanship." A 1958 second edition reissued the identical maps, deleting references to the monarchy, scratching the original date and the Survey's credit off each sheet and removing the introduction and any recognition of the British cartographers.
