num_pages: 496
description: Europe is a molehill.Everything here is worn outtiny Europe has not enough to offer.We must set off for the Orient; that is where all the greatest glory is to be achieved. NapoleonNapoleons invasion of Egypt was the first Western attack in modern times on a Middle Eastern country. In this remarkably rich and eminently readable historical account acclaimed author Paul Strathern reconstructs a mission of conquest inspired by glory executed in haste and bound for disaster.In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte only twenty-eight mounted the most audacious military campaign of his already spectacular career. With 335 ships 40000 soldiers and a collection of scholars artists scientists and inventors he set sail for Egypt to establish an Eastern empire in emulation of Alexander the Great. Like everything Napoleon ever attempted it was a plan marked by unquenchable ambition heroic romanticism and not a little madness. Napoleon saw himself as a liberator freeing the Egyptians from the oppression of their Mameluke overlords. But while Napoleon thought his army would be welcomed as heroes he tragically misunderstood Muslim culture and grossly overestimated the gratitude he could expect from those hed come to save. Instead Napoleon and his men would face a grim war of attrition against an ad hoc army of Muslims led by the feared Murad Bey. Marching across seemingly endless deserts in the shadow of the pyramids suffering extremes of heat and thirst and pushed to the limits of human endurance they would be plagued by mirages suicides and the constant threat of ambush. A crusade begun in honor and intended for glory would degenerate toward chaos and atrocity.But Napoleons grand failure in Egypt also yielded vast treasures of knowledge about a culture largely lost to the West and through the recovery of artifacts like the Rosetta Stone it prepared the way for the translation of hieroglyphics and modern Egyptology. And it tempered the complex leader who believed it his destiny to conquer the world. A story of war adventure politics and a clash of cultures Paul Stratherns Napoleon in Egypt is history at once relevant and impossible to put down.From the Hardcover edition.
language: English
title: Napoleon in Egypt
publisher: Bantam