The Battle of the Pyramids

On 21 July 1798 (1213 AH), on the Giza plain by the village of Embabeh on the west bank of the Nile, within distant sight of the ancient pyramids and across the river from Cairo, the French expeditionary army of Napoleon Bonaparte broke the Mamluk forces of Egypt in the engagement that came to be called the Battle of the Pyramids. Egypt was then a province of the Ottoman Empire, governed in practice by the Mamluk beys, chiefly Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey, the last holders of the warrior-slave caste that had ruled the country since the Middle Ages. The French had landed at Alexandria three weeks earlier, an invasion aimed at British power and the road to India, and had marched up the Nile in the summer heat. Napoleon drew his divisions into great hollow squares, each a fortress of bayonets with artillery at the corners, and the Mamluk cavalry, brave and magnificently equipped but trained for single combat and armed for an older age, charged the squares again and again and were cut down by disciplined volleys and case-shot. The horsemen could not break in; Embabeh was stormed, the Egyptian line on the river was rolled up, and Cairo lay open. The contemporary Egyptian scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (rahimahu Allah), who lived through it, recorded the invasion in his chronicle Aja'ib al-Athar with a sober and unflinching eye, describing the French entry, the plunder and the heavy hand of the occupation; his testimony, not the conquerors' memoirs, is the Muslim memory of these days. The victory did not settle the campaign. Within days the British admiral Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay, stranding Napoleon's army in Egypt; the people of Cairo rose against the occupiers, and after three years of occupation, accompanied by the savants who catalogued the country in the Description de l'Egypte, a combined Ottoman and British effort forced the French out in 1801, in the disorder that opened the way to the rise of Muhammad Ali. This scene depicts the decisive clash on the plain itself, the moment the Mamluk charge from the left strikes the standing French square as its first volleys fire, with the field cannon and tricolour beside the infantry, the village of Embabeh and the Nile on the right, and the pyramids beyond, framed soberly as a foreign invasion and a hard defeat, not as a conqueror's triumph.