by Susan Jaques
A brisk wind blew across the deck of the Junon as the dapper Dominique-Vivant Denon observed the chaotic scene. “Thousands of men leaving their country, their fortunes, their friends, their children, and their wives, almost all of whom knew nothing of the course they were about to steer, nor indeed of anything that concerned their voyage, except that Bonaparte was the leader,” he recorded in his journal.1
It was here five years earlier that Napoleon Bonaparte notched his first military victory. In defiance of France’s new republic, Toulon had opened its port to the English. The young artillery captain led his soldiers in an assault on the fort above the harbor, suffering a bayonet wound in the thigh. Napoleon’s troops bombarded the British fleet, destroying ten ships. The British fled and Napoleon was promoted to brigadier general.
Now fresh from a series of stunning victories in Northern Italy, the twenty-eight-year-old military hero had returned to Toulon with his eye on a far bigger prize. Since the 1600s, France had been vying with England for economic control around the world. Rather than risk an invasion of Britain, Napoleon proposed to hurt its lucrative trade with India by invading Egypt, gateway to Africa and Asia. With Egypt’s ruling Mamelukes controlled by the distant Ottomans, Napoleon sensed an opportunity.
Egypt was also tantalizing for personal reasons. “Europe presents no field for glorious exploits; no great empires or revolutions are to be found, but in the East where there are six hundred million men,” wrote the ambitious general, “My glory is declining. This little corner of Europe is too small to supply it. We must go East. All the great men of the world have there acquired their celebrity.”2
Though France’s state coffers were depleted from years of war, the government green-lighted Napoleon’s campaign. The five members of the Directory were more than happy to get rid of the young star who they viewed as a political threat. “The general in chief of the Army of the Orient will seize Egypt; he will chase the English from all their possessions in the Orient,” read Napoleon’s marching orders. “He will then cut the Isthmus of Suez and take all necessary measures in order to assure the free and exclusive possession of the Red Sea for the French Republic.”3
Bidding farewell to his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, Napoleon set sail from Toulon on the flagship L’Orient with several thousand crew members and soldiers. In addition to tons of explosives and 120 cannons, the former royal navy’s Dauphin Royal featured a ballroom, an elegant red damask suite for Napoleon, and a shipboard library of several hundred volumes.
Among the works were Napoleon’s favorite ancient writer Plutarch, along with Livy, Virgil, and Homer, Arrian’s account of Alexander the Great’s campaigns, and the Koran. Interestingly, the Koran was shelved with political titles along with the Bible and Montesquieu.4 In preparing for the invasion, Napoleon had studied the Comte de Volney’s description of his years in Egypt.5 During the Italian campaign, he had permanently checked out all the books about the Orient from the Milan library.
Napoleon jotted down book passages he found especially interesting. According to biographer Emil Ludwig, his notes ranged from foot-racing in ancient Crete and Hellenic fortresses in Asia Minor to the military exploits of Prussia’s Frederick the Great. Tellingly one of the passages he copied, from Raynal’s Philosophical History of the Two Indies, addressed why Alexander the Great had chosen Egypt as the center of his empire. Napoleon memorized the passage so well, writes Ludwig, he could still recite it by heart three decades later.6
With the invasion, Napoleon was deliberately following in some of history’s largest footsteps. Starting with Alexander the Great, superstars of the Greco-Roman worlds had conquered Egypt. When the twenty-four-year-old Macedonian king invaded today’s Middle East in the fall of 332 B.C.E., Egypt was part of the Persian Empire. Virtually unopposed, Alexander led forty thousand soldiers across the Nile to the capital, Memphis. He founded a city on the Mediterranean in his name, Alexandria, Egypt’s future capital.
In addition to his army, Alexander brought along a team of philosophers, geographers, and historians. Fascinated by the Nile, he sent a small exploratory expedition accompanied by Callisthenes, the campaign’s official historian. Alexander’s tutor Aristotle reported on the Nile’s magical properties, crediting the river for the fertility of Egyptian women who supposedly often had twins after just eight months of pregnancy. Soon after the conquest of Egypt, Alexander marched east in pursuit of Persia’s Darius III.
In 323 B.C.E., when Alexander died of an unknown disease in Babylon, the thirty-three-year-old ruled most of the known world. His brilliant general and childhood friend Ptolemy went on to found the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, a wealthy kingdom that would also control modern-day Libya, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Cyprus, as well as the entire southern coast of Asia Minor. Under Ptolemy, the former fishing village of Alexandria became a cultural and commercial powerhouse.
After Julius Caesar’s assassination, Cleopatra left Rome and took up with the popular general Mark Antony, married to Octavian’s sister Octavia. Together they would have three children. Joining forces against Octavian, the power couple endured a months-long standoff with their rival in 31 B.C.E. at Actium on the northwest coast of Greece. Cleopatra finally sailed back to Alexandria with her forces, followed by Anthony, handing Octavian an easy win. Octavian pursued his rivals to Egypt, capturing Alexandria in 30 B.C.E.
With his soldiers deserting him and believing Cleopatra was dead, Antony committed suicide by stabbing himself. He died in the arms of Cleopatra, who soon ended her own life and the Ptolemaic dynasty. Egypt became a Roman province under Octavian, who had Cleopatra’s son with Caesar assassinated and her children with Antony removed.7
While visiting Alexander the Great’s tomb in his eponymous city, Octavian asked to view the mummified body. After crowning Alexander’s head with a gold diadem, Octavian bent down to kiss his forehead, reportedly breaking off part of his nose.8 Alexander was lauded by the Romans who gave him the sobriquet “Great” around 200 B.C.E. According to Plutarch, Julius Caesar wept at the sight of Alexander’s statue in Spain. Caesar’s head was placed atop a statue of Alexander in Rome. During Rome’s late imperial period, Alexander’s portraits continued to circulate on coins.9
Egypt joined Sardinia and Sicily as Rome’s breadbasket, supplying a third of the Empire’s requirements. Following harvests in April and May, grain ships from Alexandria reached Rome’s ports by early June—some five million bushels a year.10 The Romans also imported water from the Nile for religious rites.
With its promise of immortality, Egypt’s religion was another popular export. The Triumvirate erected a temple to Isis, wife of Osiris, on Capitoline Hill.11 Caligula rebuilt the Iseum on the Campus Martius that featured temples to Isis and serapeums to her consort, the Greco-Egyptian deity Serapis. Nero introduced Isiac feast days into the Roman calendar, Vespasian visited Alexandria’s Serapeum, and Titus traveled to the Serapeum in Memphis. Isiac cults peaked during the Severan era, starting with Emperor Septimius Severus who converted in Egypt. Caracalla built a temple to Serapis on the Quirinal, decorated his baths with the heads of Isis and Serapis, and had himself depicted wearing the nemes, headdress of the pharoahs.
Like the ancient Greeks, Romans were infatuated with Egyptian art and culture. Egyptian art reached Rome as early as the third century B.C.E., first as gifts from the ruling Ptolemies and later as exotic home décor for Rome’s elite. The new temples in Rome dedicated to Isis and Serapis displayed statues imported from Egypt as well as Egyptian-style sculptures made in Italy. After Rome’s conquest in 30 B.C.E., Augustus brought back many spoils as symbols of his victory, along with artists and scribes.
Their work inspired copies by Roman artists. Frescoes of the Nile covered walls of villas; furniture, silverware, and glass vessels sported Egyptian motifs. Private gardens boasted sculptures of hippopotami, crocodiles, and Egyptian deities.12 Romans incorporated Egyptian art and culture, combining references to Egyptian motifs and fashion with Roman t
raditions like the portrait bust.
Egyptomania quickly spread beyond Rome. Private villas in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae were also decorated with frescoes evoking Egypt’s exotic landscape, religion, and people. As the cult of Isis took off in southern Italy, sanctuaries dedicated to the goddess sprung up. For example, a temple of Isis in Pompeii featured works imported from Egypt along with Roman statues and wall paintings with Egyptian themes.
In 18 C.E., a Roman geologist discovered a dark purple stone called porphyry in the remote eastern desert of Egypt. Rome’s emperors built imperial stone quarries at Mons Porphyrites and nearby Mons Claudianus, known for its stunning black marble. From the mountainsides, stone columns were quarried and hauled across the desert to the Nile for voyages to Rome. Nero appears to have been the first Roman emperor to be entombed in a porphyry sarcophagus. Hadrian’s Pantheon was built with gray granite from Mons Porphyrites; its porphyry decorated the inlaid panels.
Of all Rome’s emperors, Hadrian was the most smitten by Egypt. Two visits (117 and 129–130 C.E.) inspired him to dedicate a Serapeum at the Roman port of Ostia and recreate the Canopus, a sanctuary in the Nile Delta near Alexandria, at his sprawling imperial palace in Tivoli some twenty miles outside of Rome. Dedicated to Isis and Serapis, Canopus had become a cult center of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. Hadrian’s replica featured a long pool representing a branch of the Nile surrounded by a colonnade with a Temple of Serapis dug into the hillside.
During Hadrian’s second visit to Egypt, his handsome young lover Antinous drowned in the Nile under mysterious circumstances. Born in Claudiopolis (today’s Bolu, Turkey) in the Roman province of Bithynia, Antinous had met the forty-something emperor as a teenager. The bereft Hadrian founded a new Roman cult featuring his companion as a semi-divine hero equated with Osiris, Egyptian god of the underworld. On the site where Antinous died, Hadrian built the city of Antinoöpolis that became a cult center for the worship of Osiris-Antinous. Games commemorating Antinous were held in various locations including Antinoöpolis and Athens. For his villa at Tivoli, Hadrian commissioned numerous statues of Antinous as an Egyptian deity, and dozens more with pharaonic themes.
Also in his lover’s memory, Hadrian installed an obelisk in the villa’s sanctuary. The arrival of spectacular obelisks from pharaonic sanctuaries helped fuel Rome’s Egyptomania. Just before Egypt’s annexation by Rome in 30 B.C.E., Cleopatra had an obelisk brought to Alexandria. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Rome’s conquest of Egypt, Augustus ordered two additional obelisks moved from Heliopolis near Cairo to Alexandria. To get the two-hundred-plus-ton Aswan granite monoliths to Italy, Roman engineers used Egyptian technology to build a seagoing version of Nile vessels. Rowed by three hundred oarsmen, the double-ship with three hulls was so long that it took up a large part of the left side of the harbor at Ostia.13
Often dedicated to sun gods and inscribed with hieroglyphics, obelisks held great religious meaning for ancient Egyptians. Augustus used the soaring monuments to proclaim his own divine descent. According to Pliny, an obelisk on the Campus Martius served as the pointer for a colossal open-air sundial positioned to cast its shadow on the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace) on Augustus’s birthday. The message, explains Susan Sorek, was that Augustus’s reign of peace was predestined at his birth; that his rule was divine.14 Augustus installed the second obelisk at the central barrier of the Circus Maximus horse and chariot racetrack. After Augustus’s death, two more Egyptian obelisks were placed by his circular mausoleum near the Ara Pacis.
Rome’s obelisk craze continued under Augustus’s successors. Eleven more were transported to Rome, six of which were ordered by Roman emperors.15 But with the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity, the neglected monuments fell into ruin. In the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Popes Sixtus V and Pius VI turned the ancient monuments into powerful Church symbols. They added crosses to the tops of many obelisks, moving them to key sites throughout the city like the Lateran Palace, St. Peter’s Square, and the Piazza del Quirinale.
In his youth, Napoleon preferred the ancient Spartans to Alexander the Great. But before landing his fleet at Alexandria, Napoleon informed his soldiers that “the first city [they would] encounter had been built by Alexander [who did everything in a day] and [that they would find] at each footstep great memories worthy of exciting the imagination of the French.” In a letter to his brother Joseph, he invoked the Macedonian king again, writing, “. . . this land so fertile can witness the rebirth of the centuries of Alexander and Ptolemy.”16
Like Alexander, Napoleon saw himself as a civilizing hero, liberating the people of the Middle East with a new kingdom created “from the ruins of an ancient one.” Before the Egypt campaign, Napoleon wrote a childhood friend: “This country seems to offer me the most fortunate chances; the people who inhabit it, cruelly harassed by the Beys and the Mamelukes, will see with delight a brave army and a renowned general labour to extricate them from the encroachment of their oppressors. Milder laws, better treatment, a general affranchisement, will easily bind them to my standard.”17
Though ancient Egypt had long captivated the imagination of Europe, the civilization millennia older than ancient Greece and Rome remained a mystery. Between the Crusades and Napoleon’s invasion, few Europeans had actually explored the region. Little was known about the Land of the Nile except for its powerful pharaohs and their monumental pyramids and obelisks.
Like Alexander the Great, Napoleon brought to Egypt a civilian force known as the savants. Mathematician Gaspard Monge and chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, fresh from seizing art for Napoleon in Italy, spent two months conscripting colleagues for the Scientific and Artistic Commission of Egypt. The 150 member brain trust included the inventor Nicolas-Jacques Conté, physicist Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, and engineer Edme-François Jomard. The small cadre of artists included Pierre-Joseph Redouté and Dominique-Vivant Denon. Napoleon’s soldiers would dub the scholars “the mules.”
On June 9, 1798, after three rocky weeks at sea, the French armada made a brief detour at Malta. Since the Crusades, the Mediterranean island had been ruled by the Knights of Saint John, a religious-military order. Malta’s port, Valletta, was protected by a heavily armored fortress. The Knights commanded some ten thousand conscripted, unmotivated Maltese. After just a day of fighting, Malta surrendered. Within a week, Napoleon issued dozens of edicts, declared religious equality, and freed the slaves (some of whom became translators for his Egypt campaign). To finance the upcoming campaign, Monge and Berthollet looted art, weapons, silver plate, and gold.
When the French fleet neared Alexandria on June 22, Napoleon finally disclosed the top secret mission to his troops. Aboard each ship, his captains read the proclamation: “Soldiers! You are going to begin a conquest of which the effects on civilization and world commerce are incalculable! You will give the English a most sensible blow, which will be followed up with their destruction.”18 Like Rome’s generals, Napoleon promised his soldiers acres of land upon their return.
Before this, his new Army of the Orient would need to defeat a historic fighting force. Since 1517, the Mamelukes had been surrogate rulers of Egypt under the Ottoman sultan. Torn from their families as children by the Ayyubid Dynasty in the twelfth century, the Eurasians were sold in Damascas, Istanbul, and Cairo and trained as professional slave soldiers. Elite horsemen, the Mamelukes had defended Islam against the Mongols and Crusaders. But their rule was inefficient and unpopular, a fact working in Napoleon’s favor, writes Ronald Fritze.19
On the afternoon of July 1, the French fleet arrived at the bay of Alexandria. As the capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, the city had been the intellectual center of the ancient world with a celebrated library and a half a million people. Peering through a telescope at Pompey’s Column and the minarets, Denon could not contain his excitement. “It was there, said I, thinking of Cleopatra, of Caesar, and of Anthony, that the empire of glory was sacrificed to the empire of voluptuousness,” he wro
te.20
In one regard, Napoleon’s timing was fortunate. Britain’s admiral Horatio Nelson had left just two days earlier in pursuit of the French fleet. But with its granite boulders and thrashing sea, Alexandria’s harbor was notorious for destroying ships. To help guide sailors, Ptolemy had built a soaring lighthouse on the island of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Napoleon made the fatal decision of disembarking his soldiers in a thunderstorm. As thousands of his soldiers climbed down ladders and ropes, many of the rowboats capsized, throwing the men into the swells to drown. Napoleon didn’t flinch. According to Denon, “not a muscle moved” on the general’s face.21
After two days in the harbor, Denon and his fellow savants disembarked. They found the fabled city of antiquity impoverished, reduced to a population of six thousand. Like Alexander, Napoleon was met with little interest from the locals, and proceeded to march his army across the Sahara to Cairo. During the five-day trek across the desert, hundreds of his soldiers died of heatstroke in the scorching sun.22
On July 21, three weeks after landing in Alexandria, Napoleon’s army faced the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids. The fact that the pyramids were not actually visible from the battlefield did not stop him from rallying his troops with the famous line: “Soldiers! From atop these pyramids, forty centuries of history look down upon you!” Led by Murad Bey, six thousand Mameluke fighters charged at the French, sabers and pistols drawn. But their bravery and equestrian skills were no match for French weapons. Organized in squares with rifles at the sides, artillery at the corners, and cavalry inside, the French waited until the last moment before crushing the Mamelukes. In the one-hour battle, the French lost thirty men; the Mamelukes five to six thousand.
Three days later, Napoleon’s army entered Cairo in a victory procession through a triumphal arch in the city’s main square depicting the Battle of the Pyramids. As booty, Napoleon was presented with magnificent Mameluke harnesses upholstered in red velvet with gold embroidery, and red cotton saddle seats dotted with flowers and crescents and bordered with gilt copper studs. The gilt copper spurs were so sharp that the Mamelukes used them as weapons.23