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Interesting as your feature on Napoleon's “many faces” was (Christmas), it surprisingly omits his fascination with ancient Egypt. In 1798, a large party of French savants, including scientists such as Joseph Fourier, accompanied Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt. Back in France, they launched Egyptology and published the nine elephantine volumes of the Description de l'Egypte between 1809 and 1828, initially by order of Napoleon as emperor.
As for Ridley Scott's film , it shows his army in Egypt firing cannons at the Pyramids of Giza – a grotesque distortion of history. In fact, when the French army first encountered the great