"Soldiers, think that from the top of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on you!" With this phrase, Napoleon Bonaparte urged his commanders to face Muslim Mamluk troops during the Battle of the Pyramids, on July 21, 1798.
The battle was part of the French military campaign in the Orient, decided by the Directory the previous year and commanded by Bonaparte, who, aged 29, age, intended, in addition to conquering the Egyptian territory, to provide contact between the sages influenced by the European Enlightenment with the culture of the Ancient Egypt.
The military and political objective of the campaign was to sever the link between the English Empire and trade routes. arriving in India, seeking to economically weaken the British and their naval control over the Mediterranean.
Napoleon was enormously prestigious for the victorious campaigns carried out in Italy. The French army left Toulon on May 19 with around 300 ships and over 35,000 soldiers. The first conquest took place with the taking of the island of Malta on June 12th. The landing on Egyptian soil took place in Alexandria, on July 1, 1798. From there, the French army moved across the desert to conquer the city of Cairo.
The main feature of the Battle of the Pyramids was the confrontation of the famous Mamluk cavalry Muslims commanded by Murad and Ibrahim Bey, which was made up of more men than the army Napoleonic. However, the cavalry armed with swords, bows and arrows could not contain the French artillery and the square formation designed by Napoleon. French firearm technology proved more effective than the might of the famous Mamluk cavalry.
However, a month after the Battle of the Pyramids, English Admiral Horatio Nelson commanded the British fleets that they completely destroyed the French fleets in the Mediterranean, ending Napoleon's pretension of conquering the whole of the region. The French campaign turned out to be a military failure, and Napoleon left Egypt in October 1799.
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Perhaps more important than the military aspect were the work carried out by the various researchers summoned by Napoleon to participate in the Egyptian expedition. About 167 artists, doctors, botanists and scientists traveled to the East to carry out a detailed study of Egypt. Among them were the mathematician and chemist Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748-1822), the also mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), the botanical artist Henri Joseph Redouté (1766-1853), zoologist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), inventor Nicolas Jacques Conté (1775-1805) and artist Dominique Vivant Denon (1747-1825).
The main contributions of the researchers were recorded in the work Description of L’Egypte, published between 1809 and 1822, comprising 22 volumes. In addition, numerous objects found in Egypt were shipped to France. Among them, the Rosetta Stone stands out, found by chance by a soldier in the village with the same name as the stone. In her, was a text of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (210-180 a. C.), written in three ancient languages: hieroglyph, demotic and Greek. From 1822 onwards, the young philologist Jean-François Champollion, 32 years old, managed to decipher the writings of the Rosetta Stone, creating, from then on, the keys to the study of all the writings found in the buildings and archaeological finds Egyptians.
Napoleon Bonaparte intended with this expedition to weaken the English, but also to equal Alexander the Great (356 a. Ç. – 323 a. C.), both for the military successes achieved by a young general and for the contribution of the approximation of Western and Eastern cultures.
* Image Credit: Vladimir Korostyshevskiy and Shutterstock.com
By Tales Pinto
Master in History
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
PINTO, Tales dos Santos. "Napoleon and the Battle of the Pyramids (1798)"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/guerras/napoleao-batalha-das-piramides-1798.htm. Accessed on June 28, 2021.
