The Egyptian Campaign is one of the most mythologized periods in Napoleon’s career: The Alexandrian ambitions, the visit to the plague-ridden soldiers in Jaffa, the siege of Acre, Monge and the accompanying scientific expedition. But most of all it is the Battle of Pyramids with its famous tagline, “From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us” (as quoted by Eugène de Beauharnais). In Jean-Léon Gérôme‘s painting Bonaparte Before the Sphinx (1868) we see Napoleon as myth-maker, juxtaposed with the Sphinx itself. Napoleon is, as Peer Gynt after him, wondering where he has seen this face before.
Above is a photo of the Sphinx taken not long after Gérôme’s painting was finished. Presumably the soldiers are English.
