To reorganize the tax revenues and pay the country’s debts to European banking houses (emergency measures to pay the debts had precipitated the revolt), the colonial power set out to determine, for every square meter of the country’s agricultural land, the owner, the culti- vator, the quality of the soil, and the proper rate of tax. To collect, organize, and represent this information, the authorities decided to produce some- thing never achieved before, a “great land map of Egypt.” The map was in- tended not just as an instrument of administrative control or geographical knowledge, but as a means of recording complex statistical information in a centralized, miniaturized, and visual form