Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds

Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds better known as Linant Pasha (Lorient, France, November 23, 1799 – Cairo July 9, 1883) was an explorer of Egypt and, as the chief engineer of Egypt's public works, 1831–1869, the chief engineer of the Suez Canal.

Having taken advantage of a sound education that emphasized mathematics, drawing and painting, then having been given some experience at sea through the efforts of his father, Antoine-Marie, a naval officer, charting the coastal waters of Newfoundland, in 1814, aged fifteen. Having passed his entrance exams, young Linant embarked as a naval cadet on the frigate Cléopâtre, engaged on a mission to Greece, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, which he spent making drawings and doing relief mapping. One of the artists attached to the expedition having suddenly died, Linant was commissioned to replace him, drawing sites and ruins in Athens, Constantinople, Ephesus, Akka and Jerusalem. At Jaffa the expedition reached Damiatta by camel caravan, then sailed up the Nile to disembark at Cairo in December. The expedition was completed, but Linant decided not to return to France, and through a recommendation from the comte de Forbin, the expedition's director, briefly entered the service of the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, before setting out on a series of explorations that lasted from 1818 to 1830, which he described later in his Mémoires.

In 1818–19 he was in lower Nubia, beyond the Cataracts of the Nile. In 1820 he joined the expedition of the French consul general and explorer Bernardino Drovetti to the oasis of Siwa in the Libyan desert, where the oracle of Ammon had been consulted by Alexander the Great but to which no modern European had penetrated; his drawings illustrated the Voyage à l'Oasis de Syouah, published by E. Jomard (1823). Within a few months he travelled with the Italian Alessandro Ricci to Sinai: the party left Cairo and followed the peninsula's eastern coast, passing through the Wells of Moses, Wadi Gharandel and Khazne Firaoun, to arrive at Maghara, where they made copies of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. Their intention to reach Petra was foiled by the inseccurity of the area, but in returning to Cairo they passed through Sarbout el-Khadem and sketched its monuments. This first trip to Sinai enabled him to establish contacts with the Bedouin and prepare himself for the successful trip to Petra finally undertaken with Léon de Laborde in 1828.

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