Egypt Landing

After a successful campaign in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century, military focus of France turned towards a more powerful enemy, England. The campaign to Egypt was supported by Napoleon Bonaparte, who, inspired by theories of the writer and philosopher Volney, was enamored of the idea of conquering Egypt. Napoleon's reasons for an expedition to Egypt were at once emotional as well 'Real-politik-al'. The emotional from the Egyptomania wich arose during the second half of the 18th century. The political being the Directory's desire to distance from Paris a dangerously powerful military man flushed with his spectacular success in Italy, and that Directory's and Napoleon's own interest in attempting to remove Britain's powerbase on the Indian sub-continent.

The French occupation of Egypt lasted from 1798 to 1801.
For the first time in military history, an army set forth with martial as well as academic intentions. For this purpose, more than 160 scholars were selected to accompany the army to Egypt. Among them Berthollet, Dolomieu, Geoffroy Sainte-Hillaire, Hassenfratz, Jomard, Conté, Monge, Fourier
Many men of letters as Arnaud and Perceval, and the drawer Devon.

On May 10, 1798, Napoleon's army of more than 30,000 men and women set sail from Toulon, France.
He was accompagnied by his loyal lieutenants as Desaix, Kleber, Beauharnais, Ganteaume, Decres, Desgenettes, Larrey ...
On the way to Egypt, Napoleon conquered the island of Malta, to be used as a strategic base between Egypt and France
Then on July, 1798 the French army landed in Egypt near Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile. Although the city was fortified, it quickly fell to the French.

One on the most famous battle of this campaign is the Battle of Pyramids which was on July 21 1798.

In addition to the military success, the biggest progress got in Rosetta, on July, 19. Some soldiers found the famous stone during this Campaign.
Rosetta Stone is a stone engraved with  hieroglyphic, Dimutkip and Greek characters. Twenty three years later, Jean François Champollion interpreted such language after matching them with the Greek and hieroglyphic texts of the other, the stone was the key to solve the mystery of writing Heroglafah.

On the military front, the Campaign got more difficult. Napoleon decided the strike first and marched his armies into Palestine to confront the Ottomans in Syria. However, after unsuccessfully laying siege to Acre from March to May 1799, Napoleon retreated to Egypt.

The arrival of the British fleet announced the French reply. British destroyed the French ships one by one. The destruction of the French fleet was a military disaster that sealed the fate of the French expedition to Egypt.

The «Description de l'Egypte» a huge multi-volume collection compiled by the scholars of the Institut d'Égypte upon order by Napoleon Bonaparte, became later the principal resource for documenting and commemorating the French expedition to the Near East.