The battle known as the Pyramids was in fact fought at Embabeh, fifteen kilometres away. The line about forty centuries was probably written afterwards — and it worked.

Historical context

On 21 July 1798, after three weeks marching through the desert, the army finally found its enemy: Murad Bey's Mamluks, backed against the Nile near the village of Embabeh, opposite Cairo. The pyramids were visible on the horizon, some fifteen kilometres to the south-west; it was from them that the bulletin took its name.

Bonaparte formed five divisional squares, artillery at the angles, cavalry and baggage in the centre. The Mamluk charge, magnificent and suicidal, broke on the crossfire. The fight lasted a few hours: a few hundred French dead, several thousand Egyptians, many of them drowned in the Nile. The most prestigious cavalry in the East had just been destroyed by an infantry formation.

The sentence — remember that from the top of these monuments forty centuries look down upon you — appears in no document of the day itself. It is attested later, in reconstructed accounts, and was probably fixed afterwards, at Saint Helena or by the memoirists. It has become more famous than the battle.

The Giza plateau was immediately taken over by the expedition's scholars. Monge and Berthollet measured the Great Pyramid and calculated the volume of stone; the draughtsmen recorded the half-buried Sphinx. These surveys fed the Description de l'Égypte, and the Rosetta Stone brought back from the same campaign allowed Champollion to decipher hieroglyphs in 1822. Egyptology was born of a lost military expedition.