Napoleon was fascinated by Alexander
the Great, and for that reason, he deserves some attention as France
celebrated the bicentenary of Napoleon’s
death on 5 May 2021.
The young general launched his Egyptian campaign in 1798 in order to cut off
the British route to India.
At the same time, he intended to free Egypt from the Mameluk warriors.
With his fleet, he landed in Alexandria and fought his way inland to Cairo and the Pyramids. Unfortunately for
him, the British Royal Navy, under the command of Lord Nelson, sunk the French fleet on the Nile, and Napoleon was forced to return to France, leaving his troops behind – something Alexander
would never have done!
However, Napoleon
somehow managed to turn his disastrous campaign into a cultural and scientific
victory. Egypt,
in those days, had little or no interest in the legacy of the great pharaohs
from antiquity, which they dismissed as pagan.
Inspired by Alexander,
Napoleon added a large number of scientists, engineers,
artists, cartographers, botanists, mathematicians, and art connoisseurs to his army.
History does not remember most of their names, but it is worth mentioning, for
instance, Mathieu de Lesseps, whose son Ferdinand built the Suez Canal half a century later (see also: The
canal of the pharaohs, the Suez Canal of antiquity). Napoleon
founded the Institute
of Egypt with four
distinctive sections: Mathematics, Physics, Political Economy, and Literature
and Arts.
Napoleon’s scientific expedition made extensive studies of the
pyramids and temples of Egypt,
and in particular of the statues of Pharaohs like the head of Amenhotep III, which can still be admired
in the Louvre today. At that time, a slab of black basalt was discovered
at Rosetta, some 35 miles from Alexandria,
displaying a trilingual inscription in Greek, Demotic and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
After the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Napoleon
lost most of the excavated objects to the British, including the Stone of
Rosetta and the Sarcophagus of Nectanebo II,
which, among other items, ended up in the British Museum.
Importantly, the French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs using the
Greek text on the Stone of Rosetta to guide him. This was a huge step forward
in discovering and studying the culture of ancient Egypt. Interestingly, the inscription
on the stone honors Ptolemy V,
who lived from 210-180 BC.
During his extensive campaigns, Napoleon didn’t shy away from acquiring
whatever artifact pleased him or was of some value. Most of his collection
ended up at the Louvre and included, for instance, the Horses of San
Marco in Venice (which originally stood in the Hippodrome
of Constantinople) and
one splendid frieze from the Parthenon in Athens.
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