2023-12-21 00:40:40
Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’ movie shows a controversial scene (just one?) in which French troops shoot at the Great Pyramids of Egypt in a boast that no one and nothing could stop the Gran Corso. An invented scene that has resurrected an old myth, in an advanced phase of demystification, which states that the real Napoleon whom he ordered to bomb went to the Sphinx of Giza to perform a rhinoplasty with cannon fire.
This false anecdote that sometimes appears in travel guides is incredible. It could not be the french emperor responsible for the current state of the Sphinx, nor could they have been English soldiers from the colonial era as another hypothesis suggests. Some drawings made in 1737 by the Danish architect Frederick Lewis Norden They already showed a Sphinx lacking a nasal appendage.
Before these hypotheses, the 15th century historian a l-Maqrizi attributed the disappearance to Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, a Sufi religious fanatic who, in 1378, upon seeing that peasants were making offerings to the Sphinx to obtain better crops, decided to damage the monument. It is the most solid theory but, as in everything related to this enigmatic construction, it also belongs to the realm of uncertainty.
all in the Sphinx of Giza radiates mystery. Its origin, the reasons for its construction, its function and even its name. The word “sphinx” comes from the Greek “sfigx”, which means strangler and is used to designate a demon of destruction and bad luck that Greek culture represents as a creature with the body of a lion and the wings of a bird. The Greek sphinx was the guardian of the city of Thebes, which only allowed travelers to pass who were able to answer the riddle: «What creature with a single voice walks with four legs in the morning, with two at noon and with three at night, and is weaker the more legs it has? ». If he made a mistake, the sphinx strangled the traveler and ate him. However, despite the notoriety of the Hellenic version, the figure of Giza is much older than these Greek beliefs and, rather, is what inspired the rest of the sphinxes.
The face of Pharaoh Khafre?
The Sphinx of Giza is located near the Nile River, a few kilometers from what is now the Egyptian capital, Cairo. Its construction has traditionally been located during the period of the Pharaoh Khafre (approximately 4,500 years ago) who would have placed a limestone sentinel in front of his famous pyramid in the Jafra Valley. Archaeologists, however, have not been able to conclude who exactly its sponsor was and what its construction process was like. His connection with Kefrén is based on similarities in architectural styles, but does not have documentary support of any kind.
Great Sphinx of Guiza. ABC
Its construction is not mentioned in Old Kingdom texts and its existence is omitted by the Greek historian Herodotus, which does describe in detail the characteristics of the pyramids of Giza, which has led to the belief that for long periods of time the Sphinx remained completely buried in the sand. In the time of the Roman Pliny ‘The Elder’ it was visible again and he recorded in his texts that he remained buried there. King Harmais (or Horemheb). He was wrong. The Roman author also notes another false belief of the local population: that the Sphinx had been carved and then transported to the plateau. The proximity of a quarry with the same material used in its construction rules out this theory.
The structure, 20 meters high, is made up of a human head facing East (where the sun rises in the morning), dressed in the “nemes” (a white and blue striped garment), and a body of a lying lion. The face exhibits traces of red paint and certain vestiges of red and black are shown around the body area. This human face would be that of Pharaoh Khafre or perhaps that of his father, Khufu (Keops), according to the few mentions that have been found. In the Dream Stele, a stone carved a millennium later by the pharaoh Thutmose IV, appears the only direct testimony that Khafre was the creator of the Sphinx. Although those parts of the text were also lost during an excavation in 1925.
Napoleon’s scientific expedition
In the midst of all these speculations, the popular belief emerged that it was the Napoleonic troops who, using the Sphinx as a target in their artillery practices, left the sculpture without a nose. The theory, however, clashes with the spirit of an expedition, between the military and the scientific, which helped Europe to rediscover Egyptian civilization. With the aim of liberating Egypt from Turkish hands, the promising General Bonaparte, victorious in Italy, landed in the country of the Nile during the summer of 1798 with more than thirty thousand French soldiers, aiming to advance towards Syria.
A group of researchers from different disciplines (mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, archaeologists, geographers, historians…), more than a hundred, accompanied Napoleon to study in detail that country of the wonderful pyramids and the ancient gods. . Among them were the mathematicians Gaspard Monge, founder of the Polytechnic School; the physicist Étienne-Louis Malus; and the chemist Claude Louis Bertholle, inventor of bleach. That is to say, some of the most brilliant scientists of their generation responded to the call of the 28-year-old general, without even knowing the destination of the trip until they sailed past Malta: “I can’t tell you where we are going, but it is a place to conquer glory and knowledge.
«I can’t tell you where we are going, but it is a place to achieve glory and knowledge»
There, Napoleon found a Sphinx without a nose and buried in the sand; He entered the Great Pyramid on a strange spiritual journey; and his men found the key to connect the West with Egypt. While a soldier was digging a trench around the medieval fortress of Rachid (an Egyptian port enclave in the Mediterranean Sea), he accidentally found what is known as the Rosetta stone, which was used to finally decipher the unintelligible Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was a ruling by King Ptolemy, dated 196 BC. C, written in three versions: hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. From the Greek text it was possible to find the equivalences in the hieroglyphs and establish a code to read the ancient texts.
a secret door
Napoleon’s soldiers did not cause any damage to the construction. In fact, not even French scholars devoted much attention to the Sphinx during their expedition. They drew maps of the plateau and cleaned the area behind the monument of sand. Little more.
The supposed discoveries came later. Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, assured some time later that Napoleon had found a door that allowed access to the interior of the Sphinx. The Benermerut Stele, from the reign of Thutmose III, also reveals an open door on the side of the base, which has encouraged successive archaeologists to search for interior chambers without great results until today.
Napoleon visiting the plague-stricken of Jaffa, by Antoine-Jean Gros (1804). ABC
According to the historian Muhammed al-Husayni Taqi Al-Din, the only person responsible for causing the destruction of the Sphinx was a religious fanatic who, in 1378, destroyed its nose and partially its ears. For this attack he was finally sentenced to death by the local authorities. What is not clear is whether he was also to blame for the loss of his beard, the remains of which were found during modern excavations and are today partially preserved in the British Museum in London. A stone beard that was added after the construction of the monument, since there are no signs of damage on the jaw as they should appear if it had been part of the original structure.
Perhaps it fell down naturally like other parts of the structure. The limestone of the monument is of such poor quality that it has been deteriorating more obviously than other buildings on the same plateau. At the end of the 20th century, fragments of limestone fell on two occasions: it sank in 1981 a piece of the lining of the left hind leg; and in 1988 a three-ton fragment of his right shoulder collapsed.
#destroyed #Muslim #fanatic