Battle of the Pyramids

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of the Pyramids began with a promise shouted across the sand. On the 21st of July 1798, General Bonaparte told his weary soldiers, "From the top of those pyramids, forty centuries are contemplating you." The monuments were nowhere near the fight. The fighting took place around the village of Embabeh in Ottoman-controlled Egypt, yet Napoleon later named it after the Great Pyramid of Giza. That grand label raises several questions. How did a European army on foot hold off some of the most feared horsemen of the age? Who were the rulers it defeated, and what became of them? And why did a victory so complete fail to give Napoleon the Egypt he wanted?

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• 2. The Road to Embabeh

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  Two Georgian Mamluks, Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey, commanded Egypt's military forces when the French arrived. Their army combined elite, heavily armoured cavalry with fellahin militia who served as infantry. The French had captured Alexandria on the 2nd of July 1798 and then marched across the desert toward Cairo. Bonaparte wanted to break the power of the Mamluk beys and seize the capital before Ottoman reinforcements could reach Egypt. A first clash came on the 13th of July, when French scouts found Murad's encampment near Shubra Khit. Bonaparte ordered an immediate advance. French artillery destroyed the Mamluk flagship on the Nile and forced the defenders to retreat. This skirmish gave Bonaparte his first victory in the campaign. It also showed that concentrated firepower could answer a cavalry charge. The decisive meeting came about 9 miles from the Pyramids and 4 miles from Cairo.

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• 3. Squares and Flanks

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  Napoleon allowed his men only a short rest after a night of marching, and then ordered them into formation. Each of his five divisions became a hollow rectangle, with cavalry and baggage sheltered in the middle and cannon placed at the corners. The army advanced south in echelon, with the right flank in front and the Nile guarding the left. From right to left, the divisions answered to Louis Desaix, Jean-Louis-Ébénézer Reynier, Charles-François-Joseph Dugua, Honoré Vial and Louis André Bon. Desaix also sent a detachment to occupy the nearby village of Biktil. Facing them, Murad Bey had anchored his right on the Nile at Embabeh. That village was fortified with infantry and artillery. His left rested on Biktil, where he had placed more guns, and his Mamluk cavalry filled the centre. Across the river, Ibrahim Bey's army watched the battle but could not cross to join it. Murad hoped to hold the French against his fortified flanks and then strike their centre with a cavalry charge.

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• 4. Charge and Collapse

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  One armoured rider galloped to within a few steps of the French lines and demanded a duel. Musket fire shot him down. Other charges followed against the squares. At about 15:30, Murad ordered his defterdar, Ayyub Bey, to lead a mass assault. The divisions of Desaix, Reynier and Dugua held firm, driving the horsemen back with musketry and artillery. Some Mamluks then turned on Desaix's detached force, but they failed there too. A written account of the fighting captures the chaos. It says that "the winds blew strong, and dust flew, and the skies darkened from the dust and gun smoke." The same account says people "thought that the Earth had moved like a quake and that the skies had fallen." Meanwhile, near the river, Bon's division formed attack columns and stormed Embabeh. The garrison broke and many men fled into the Nile, where hundreds drowned.

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• 5. The Toll and the Escape

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  French reports listed 29 killed and 260 wounded, a loss of roughly 300 men. Murad's side suffered far more, though estimates vary widely. Figures range from several thousand casualties to as many as 10,000. Thousands were killed or wounded, including Ayyub Bey and perhaps 3,000 of the elite Mamluk cavalry. The defeat shattered Murad's field army. Murad himself was wounded in the cheek by a saber, yet he escaped with several thousand cavalry to Upper Egypt. From there he fought a guerrilla campaign against the French. It ended only in late 1799, when he was defeated by Desaix, the general who had led the French right flank at Embabeh.

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• 6. Cairo Under Occupation

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  News of the defeat of their legendary cavalry sent the Mamluk armies waiting in Cairo scattering to Syria. Bonaparte entered the conquered capital on the 24th of July. On the 11th of August his forces caught up with Ibrahim Bey and crushed him at Salalieh. Napoleon then set up a French administration in Cairo and put down later rebellions with force. He also tried to win over the local ulama, the Muslim scholars. Al-Jabarti, one such scholar, poured scorn on French cultural claims. Official proclamations spoke of goodwill, and some French soldiers even converted to Islam to marry locally. Even so, Abdullah al-Sharqawi, who headed Napoleon's Cairo divan, later called the occupiers "materialist, libertine philosophers" who "deny the resurrection, and the afterlife, and" the prophets. The French were no kinder in private. The mathematician Joseph Fourier lamented that "the Muslim religion would on no account permit the development of the mind."

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• 7. Ten Days Later

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  Barely ten days after Embabeh, British Vice-admiral Horatio Nelson destroyed the French navy at the Battle of the Nile. That blow cut Napoleon's army off from France and curtailed his ambitions in the region. It blunted the strategic gain of the land victory almost at once. Yet the earlier battle still marked a turning point for Egypt itself. It signalled the beginning of the end of seven centuries of Mamluk dominance. Artists soon took up the story.

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• 8. The Battle in Art

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  François-André Vincent depicted the battle in a preparatory sketch and a painting. Later artists returned to it, including Antoine-Jean Gros, Carle Vernet and François-Louis-Joseph Watteau. The fight has also reached the screen. It appears in Ridley Scott's 2023 historical drama Napoleon. Reviews of the film have faulted its historical inaccuracies, such as showing French troops firing on the pyramids.

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