Napoleon in Egypt (65 page)

Such work was matched by that of the indefatigable biologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who had moved on from his detailed study of the habits of the ostrich to similarly freakish occurrences throughout nature. In doing so, he opened up an entirely new science which specialized in the study of the natural monstrosities and abnormal formations which occur in the animal and plant worlds, to which he gave the name
teratology
(from the Greek
teras
, meaning a marvel, prodigy or monster). Many of his finds were now preserved in bottles and pressings in the basement of the Institute building, extending the studies of the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus, who just fifty years previously had laid the foundations of our understanding of different genera and species. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s studies marked an advance into previously uncharted science, and in time both Darwin’s theory of evolution and later the study of genetics would gain insight from the new field of teratology founded in Egypt.

However, by far the most spectacular discovery of all was announced at the Institute meeting of July 19, 1799, in a report sent by the mathematician-savant Lancret. A few days earlier, during demolition work prior to the reconstruction of Fort Julien near Rosetta, a French soldier had unearthed a slab of black basalt, one side of which was carved with various inscriptions. The officer in charge, Lieutenant Bouchard, had shown the stone to Lancret, who had immediately recognized its significance. Lancret’s report to the Institute described the stone as having three horizontal bands of inscriptions: “the first, at the bottom, contains several lines of Greek characters, which were inscribed in the reign of Ptolemy Philopater; the second inscription is written in unknown characters; and the third consists only of hieroglyphs.”
¹⁵
This black basalt slab, just four feet high and weighing three quarters of a ton, would become known as the Rosetta Stone.

Lancret shipped it to Cairo, where its Greek inscription was found to be a decree, issued by the Temple priests at Memphis on a date equivalent to March 27, 196
BC
. After inspecting the slab in some detail, the savants reached the opinion that each of the three different inscriptions probably contained the same message. The script of the middle inscription was at first thought to be an early form of Arabic, but this turned out not to be the case. Even so, it appeared that the stone contained two different versions which might prove the key to translating its ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Here was the instrument which might open up for the first time the closed book of ancient Egyptian history inscribed on so many of the country’s ruins.

But the initial enthusiasm at this discovery soon lapsed into despair. It became clear that the hieroglyphs did not match in any simple word-for-word way with the ancient Greek. The mathematicians set to work with their code-breaking skills, and the Orientalists attempted to read the hieroglyphs as if they were Chinese-style ideograms—but all to no avail. The Institute ordered that rubbings, drawings and even plaster casts be taken of the Rosetta Stone, which they intended to distribute to scholars throughout Europe, whose knowledge might afford them a means of deciphering the hieroglyphic text. But for the time being the savants were thwarted: the Rosetta Stone remained a mystery.

Just a few weeks after this spectacular discovery, Vivant Denon arrived back in Cairo from Upper Egypt. His fellow savants were shocked at the fifty-two-year-old artist’s appearance. With his straggly greying locks growing down to his shoulders, and looking emaciated and disheveled after the rigors of Desaix’s relentless campaigning up and down the Nile, he seemed like a madman in his manic enthusiasm to tell of the wonders that he had seen. But when the members of the Institute saw what he had brought with him, they quickly began to share his excitement. Denon’s notebooks and sketchpads contained hundreds of drawings of the temples and vast ruins that lay along the banks of the upper Nile. These drawings were accompanied by voluminous notes and diagrams explaining all that he had seen—from the Dendera Zodiac to the behavior of the troglodytes who lived amongst the tombs at Thebes, from the effects of a plague of locusts to the workings of the ancient Nilometer at Aswan. And of course there was page after page of transcribed hieroglyphs, copied from the walls, the temples and the columns of the ruins he had seen.

Napoleon immediately ordered that two commissions of savants should be established, and should make preparations to leave for Upper Egypt to catalog all that had been found there. Desaix had specifically requested that he be sent more engineers to back up his military endeavors and assist his administration, and the two commissions were soon well stocked with young engineer-savants keen to see for themselves the fabulous ruins of this lost civilization. When they finally arrived in Upper Egypt some months later, their enthusiasm would be the cause of some friction between them and Desaix’s officers. The engineers were so keen to record the hieroglyphs and spectacular temples they saw that they became increasingly distracted from their military duties. Indeed, such was their enthusiasm that they quickly ran out of pencils. But several of these young engineer-savants had spent time in the workshops of the ingenious Conté, and they soon came up with a solution to their problems, melting down the lead from the soldiers’ bullets, and using this to make lead pencils. Such resourcefulness may not have endeared them to the military officers, but it enabled them to make a comprehensive catalog of all that they had seen—a vast collection whose publication would one day stir the imagination of Europe.

Desaix had succeeded in chasing Murad Bey into Nubia, but the Mamelukes would soon begin circling back to attack his supply lines along the Nile. Yet eventually Desaix’s constant pursuit had managed to wear down even Murad Bey and his 300 remaining warriors, who in March 1799 had taken refuge in the Kharga oasis. This was 150 miles west of Luxor in the vastness of the Libyan desert, out of reach even of Desaix, and here Murad Bey and his last warriors had remained, watching and waiting, for over four months. Despite this remote location, Murad Bey had managed to retain contact with some of his scattered Mameluke forces, even receiving the occasional message from as far afield as Djezzar in Syria. And around early July he had received a secret message which had prompted him and his warriors to ride north towards Lower Egypt.

Word eventually reached Napoleon in Cairo that Murad Bey and his men had been sighted out near the Natron Lakes some sixty miles northwest of Cairo. It looked as if he was intent upon making contact with Sir Sidney Smith and his blockading squadron, which was now back in place off Alexandria. Napoleon decided to adopt the same tactics as Desaix: “This is my urgent wish: it is vital that we kill Murad Bey or drive him until he drops dead of exhaustion, either way, so long as he dies.”
¹⁶
He decided to let loose his finest cavalry commander to give chase. On July 12 General Murat and his cavalry column were ordered into the desert to seek out Murad Bey and attack him. Napoleon impressed upon Murat, “The general who has the pleasure of destroying Murad Bey will put the seal on the conquest of Egypt: I very much hope that fate has reserved this glory for you.”
¹⁷

But the elusive Murad Bey managed to give General Murat the slip, and the following day Napoleon’s intelligence learned that he had doubled back towards Cairo. Just fifteen miles from the city he had paused to climb the Great Pyramid, where he had exchanged glinting mirror-signals with his wife, standing on the rooftop of her palace at Giza. There was no hint of what information these signals had contained, but Napoleon was not concerned about this. He now knew that Murad Bey was down to just “200 Mamelukes, half on horseback, half on camels, all in a bad way, as well as 50 to 60 Arabs.” He at once set off himself in pursuit, leading his cavalry across the Nile’s new pontoon bridges to Giza, where he camped for the night. Next day, as he wrote with almost childish enthusiasm to Kléber: “I have spent all day riding through the desert beyond the Pyramids, giving chase to Murad Bey.”
¹⁸
Bourrienne described what happened after this exhilarating but ultimately fruitless day’s hunting: “On the evening of 15 July we set out on a stroll into the desert in a northerly direction, when we noticed, on the route from Alexandria, an Arab riding towards us full tilt. He delivered to the general-in-chief a dispatch from General Marmont in Alexandria.”
¹⁹
This news solved the riddle of the secret messages that Murad Bey had received: a Turkish fleet consisting of five battleships, three frigates and over fifty troop carriers had arrived and anchored off Aboukir Bay, where under the protection of Sir Sidney Smith and the British squadron it had already unloaded some 10,000 troops onto the beaches. The in vasion had begun.

It was now that Napoleon once again demonstrated his supreme caliber, both as a man and as a military leader. Despite being exhausted after the long day’s chase, as well as having Murat and his crack cavalry scattered through the desert, his response was immediate and decisive. This was the moment he had been waiting for. Orders were at once dispatched to Marmont on the coast, Kléber and his division in the eastern delta, Murat in the Western Desert and Desaix in Upper Egypt. Marmont was ordered to remain in Alexandria: it was essential that his 1,200 troops held the city’s defenses and were not drawn out into combat with the vastly superior invasion force. This meant abandoning to their fate the thirty-five men of the garrison in the fort at Aboukir Point, as well as another 300 troops in the nearby camp. The 300 men were quickly overrun and slaughtered by the invading Turks, but the soldiers in the fort managed to hold out for three days before surrendering.

Kléber’s division was ordered to make post-haste for Damanhur, forty miles southeast of Aboukir Bay, where Murat’s cavalry was to regroup and meet up with him. Napoleon himself would join them with a large contingent of troops from Cairo, and together they would make ready to confront the advancing Turkish invading force. A measure of how serious Napoleon considered the situation can be seen from the fact that he withdrew virtually all his troops from Cairo, leaving the city’s streets and defenses largely in the hands of the Greek Barthelemy and his notorious “police.” Meanwhile Desaix was ordered to make his way back down the Nile as quickly as possible with as many of his division as he could spare, so that he could provide back-up in case the invaders broke past Napoleon and marched on Cairo.

In just over four days Napoleon had put affairs in order in Cairo and then covered the 100 miles north to Damanhur, where he was assembling 10,000 French troops, as well as Murat’s 1,000 cavalry. Kléber and his division were still on their way. But the intelligence Napoleon now received caused him to make a rapid reassessment of his plans. The Turkish force was led by the renowned white-bearded Sayd Mustafa-Pasha, who in previous campaigns had led the Turkish army to several victories against the Russians. He had already disembarked his entire force, which according to Napoleon’s latest intelligence amounted to around 15,000 men. These had taken possession of the Aboukir peninsula and had dug in with three lines of defense across its flat half-mile-wide neck, with their positions protected from the sea by Turkish gunboats and the firepower from the British squadron anchored further out. Sayd Mustafa-Pasha was an experienced general, and had learned of Napoleon’s strengths: the sensational speed with which he could maneuver his troops on the battlefield, and the imperviousness of the French battle squares to enemy charges. In order to neutralize these advantages, he had chosen initially to dig in and form an impenetrable beachhead, which could not be outmaneuvered and was not vulnerable to French defensive squares. The French would now have to attack him. Napoleon immediately saw the weakness of such tactics: the invasion was contained, and its defensive position was ultimately flawed, as it meant that the Turks had nowhere to fall back in retreat except the sea.

But this could only be the first stage of the Turkish invasion. Napoleon guessed that it would not be long before Mustafa-Pasha launched a mobile force from his well-established beachhead, one which could easily elude the gathered French forces and attack anywhere in Egypt at will. He decided to move at once. Without waiting for Kléber’s division, he hastily marched for Aboukir Bay, which he reached on July 24. To his relief, he saw that the Turkish forces had not yet launched out of their beachhead, and he immediately began lining up his divisions, ready for battle the following day.

That night, as he was discussing his plans with Murat, he exclaimed: “This battle will decide the fate of the world.”
²⁰
The remark puzzled Murat; it has usually been interpreted, in the light of later experience, as an oblique reference confirming that Napoleon had already decided to return to France. However, it is worth pointing out that Napoleon here referred to “the world,” rather than simply “Europe,” the designation which he would probably have made if he had already decided to return to France. Thus it appears more likely that even at this late stage he still had in mind the possibility of marching on Constantinople or India—an event which would certainly have involved “the fate of the world.”