Battle of the Pyramids

Napoleon drew his divisions into great hollow squares, artillery and baggage packed inside, and the formations broke wave after wave of charging Mamluk horsemen, a textbook lesson in disciplined infantry beating cavalry. The name is a piece of theatre: the fighting was at the riverside village of Embabeh, opposite Cairo and miles from the pyramids that stood only on the horizon. The Mamluk beys were splendid and obsolete, richly armed riders meeting cannon, and French soldiers afterward stripped gold from the dead. The victory handed Bonaparte Cairo and control of Egypt, but within days Nelson destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay and stranded the whole army. The campaign's lasting legacy was not military but cultural, the scholars who came with it and the Description de l'Egypte they produced.

The battle is a study in myth-making over fact. The very name fused a fight at a Nile-bank village with the world's most famous monuments to mythologize the campaign, and the famous line about forty centuries looking down from the pyramids is of doubtful authenticity, most likely polished after the event. Historians also read the engagement as the collision of a modern gunpowder army with a chivalric cavalry order, and place it at the birth of Egyptology and of what later scholars would call Orientalism, through the savants who accompanied the army. Its real significance is symbolic and cultural far more than strategic.