1828 and 1829 when Champollion led the Franco-Tuscan expedition, he realized that many of the monuments he had seen during his first visit had disappeared. He tried to convince Mehemet Ali that there was an urgent need to halt such destruction. But it was not done until 1858, when the Turkish Viceroy Saïd Pacha decided to act and appointed Mariette “Directeur des fouilles,” that is, chief engineer for excavations. Under Mariette’s leadership intensive archaeological research began in Upper Egypt and in Memphis, in Lower Egypt, eventually reaching as far as Sudan.

It was not until 1880 that the involvement of France in the archaeology of Egypt was, thanks to Gaston Maspero, definitely settled. Succeeding Mariette, Maspero had no easy task. He was in charge of creating a permanent French archaeological foundation in Cairo, similar to those already established in Athens and Rome. The aims of the new research foundation (known in the beginning as the Ecole Française du Caire) were the survey and perusal of the history and philology of Egyptian antiquities and, later, of Oriental antiquities as well. This latter integration of the archaeology of the Near East into the foundation’s research work originated in 1898, and the institute was renamed the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire (IFAO), a designation that remains unchanged to the present day. The foundation of the institute in Cairo fulfilled Mariette’s ambitions and confirmed the place of French archaeology in Egypt. The bonds between the Egyptian Service des Antiquités and the French Institute (IFAO) became stronger as the French foundation was the source, for many years, of the Egyptian civil servants of the Service des Antiquités—with one exception when Jacques De Morgan was head of the Service from 1892 to 1897. But until the Egyptians could directly and permanently manage and staff their entire civil service, almost all of the surveyors and curators appointed in Egypt were ancient “pensionnaires” of the IFAO. Thus, all during the second half of the nineteenth century, French archaeology in Egypt was predominantly organized around the IFAO, and to this day it remains the center of French archaeological research in Egypt.

In the rest of the territories of the Ottoman Empire in Asia, the growth of archaeology was entirely different. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries France and other countries were passionately involved in investigating and collecting antiquities. By the middle of the nineteenth century, France had started excavating in mesopotamia, due to the establishment of a French consulate in Mossoul in 1842. Mossoul stands beside the remains of Quyundjik, believed since the Middle Ages to be those of the ancient city of nineveh. French scholars encouraged diplomat paul-emile botta to begin excavating the site, which led to the revival of an interest in Assyrian civilization and was the starting point for French archaeological research in Mesopotamia. However the results were disappointing and in 1843, Botta abandoned the site and moved on to excavate the “tell” of Khorsabad. Here he was certain that he had at last found Nineveh. This was confirmed in 1847 with the decipherment of cuneiform epigraphy that he had excavated from the palace of Sargon II at Dûr Sharrûkin. Botta’s excavations from 1842 to 1844 not only endowed France with the first Assyrian collection in a museum in Europe but also provided archaeologists with important data concerning Assyrian epigraphy and monuments, published in 1849–1850 as the Monuments de Ninive. Botta was transferred to a minor diplomatic post, interrupting French research at the original site and leaving it free for the English archaeologist austen henry layard to excavate. His success incited France to resume Mesopotamian archaeology.

In Botta the duties of consul were united with the work of an archaeologist, which inaugurated a tradition in French archaeology in the area—it remained a consular activity during all of the nineteenth century. Thus in 1852 the French government encouraged Victor Place, also a consul at Mossoul, to resume the research of his predecessor at Khorsabad—and he quite successfully did. Unfortunately, in May 1855 the rafts carrying the material discovered during the expedition were attacked by Bedouins, and the greatest part of them sank. This great loss put an end to the first period of French archaeological investigation in Mesopotamia.