Napoleon Invades Egypt and Wins the Battle of the Pyramids
A French army crushes the Mamluk cavalry near Cairo and briefly makes Egypt a French possession
Quick facts
- Landed near Alexandria
- 1 July 1798
- Battle of the Pyramids
- 21 July 1798, at Embabeh
- French occupation ended
- 1801
- Notable discovery during campaign
- The Rosetta Stone, found near Rosetta
What happened
On 1 July 1798, General Napoleon Bonaparte landed near Alexandria with an armada carrying the newly formed Armee d'Orient, intending to strike at British interests in the Mediterranean and the route to India. Marching on Cairo, Napoleon's forces met a larger Mamluk cavalry force at Embabeh on 21 July 1798, organizing his divisions into massive infantry squares with cannons at the corners that shattered the Mamluk cavalry charges. The battle was over within a few hours, with roughly ten thousand Egyptian casualties against a few hundred French dead and wounded, and Bonaparte's army entered Cairo three days later without further resistance. French forces occupied Egypt until a combined British and Ottoman campaign forced their surrender in 1801, ending the brief French occupation and returning Egypt to nominal Ottoman control. Soldiers in Napoleon's army also stumbled onto an inscribed stone slab near the town of Rosetta during the campaign, a discovery that would later unlock the ability to read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Why it matters
Napoleon's invasion shattered the long-standing Mamluk military establishment that had effectively ruled Egypt under nominal Ottoman authority, opening a power vacuum that Muhammad Ali would fill within a few years of the French withdrawal. The campaign also brought a large contingent of French scientists and scholars to Egypt, launching the modern academic study of ancient Egyptian civilization that would culminate in the decipherment of hieroglyphic writing.
How we know
The invasion and the Battle of the Pyramids are documented in detail by the World History Encyclopedia's account of the campaign, including troop movements, casualty figures, and the timeline of Cairo's occupation.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Battle of the Pyramids · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Napoleon's Campaign in Egypt and Syria · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Ancient Egypt → · The Rosetta Stone found during Napoleon's campaign is the same stone that let Jean-Francois Champollion decipher hieroglyphs in 1822; see the Ancient Egypt timeline for that discovery and decipherment in full.