Egyptian Campaign
Napoleon landed near Alexandria on 1 July 1798 with some 36,000 men and 167 scientists. The strategic argument was that France could not invade Britain across the Channel and could strike at its route to India instead. The personal argument was that Bonaparte at twenty-eight needed a theatre of his own, and the Directory was glad to have him somewhere else. He beat the Mamluk cavalry at the Pyramids on 21 July, telling his troops that forty centuries looked down on them. Nelson found the French fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay on 1 August and destroyed it by sending ships between the line and the shoal so that the French were engaged on both sides. Eleven of thirteen ships were taken or burned, and the army was stranded. He marched into Syria in 1799, took Jaffa and had some 3,000 prisoners shot or bayoneted to save ammunition, failed at Acre against a defence supported by British naval guns, and came back with plague in the ranks. He left for France in August 1799 without telling the army, and seized power three months later. The scientific expedition is what survived. The Commission des Sciences et Arts surveyed, measured and drew everything, and published the Description de l'Égypte in twenty-three volumes over two decades. An officer at Rosetta found a slab with the same decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek. Champollion deciphered it in 1822, and Egyptology exists because of a failed invasion. The stone itself was surrendered to the British at Alexandria in 1801 and has been in the British Museum since. Egypt has requested its return.
- Year: 1798 CE
- Category: Military
