Battle of the Pyramids
Napoleon destroyed the Mamluk army outside Cairo on 21 July 1798, and the pyramids were about fifteen kilometres away. The expedition to Egypt had sailed from Toulon in May with some 35,000 troops and 167 scholars, engineers and artists, on the argument that taking Egypt would cut Britain's route to India and that the Directory would be glad to have Bonaparte somewhere else. He took Malta on the way and reached Alexandria a few days ahead of Nelson, who had been searching the Mediterranean for him. The march to Cairo across the desert in July cost men to heatstroke, thirst and suicide. The Mamluks were the military caste that had governed Egypt for five centuries under nominal Ottoman authority, and their cavalry was individually superb, magnificently equipped, and had not fought a European army in living memory. Napoleon formed his divisions into squares with artillery at the corners and the baggage in the middle, and told the troops that forty centuries looked down on them. The charges broke on the squares. Some 6,000 Mamluks died, many drowned in the Nile, against about 300 French, and the bodies were stripped by soldiers who found gold sewn into the clothing. Cairo fell the next day. Ten days later Nelson found the French fleet at Aboukir Bay and destroyed it, which left the army in Egypt with no way home. The scholars stayed, found the Rosetta Stone, and produced the Description de l'Égypte. The scholars are what the expedition is remembered for outside France. The Rosetta Stone was surrendered to the British in 1801 and is in the British Museum, and Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs from copies of it in 1822, which is where Egyptology begins.
- Year: 1798 CE
- Category: Military
