Although popular legend blames Napoleon and his troops during the French campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) for having shot the nose off the Great Sphinx, in fact this story just isn't true. I have yet to locate an original source for this myth. The idea that Napoleon was to blame for the Sphinx's missing nose dates at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. One traveler to Egypt around the time of World War One wrote the following: "To take our photos sitting in front of -the Sphinx on a camel was the aim of another .... And so, repulsing the hordes of robbers on all sides, we came to the wonderf ul, inscrutable, worth-millions-of-pounds-to-authors Sphinx. The great riddle of the mysterious East. How many reams of rubbish have been written about this misshapen block of stone. Napoleon, a practical man, fired a few cannon balls at its face. High explosive shells were not invented in those days." [From: Sommers, Cecil. Temporary Crusaders. (London: John Lane, 1919) Chapter VI. "19th April."] Another book from about the same time, In the Footsteps of Napoleon (1915) by James Morgan (p 85), states "There is a tradition among the Arabs of the Pyramids that all the scars of time and the wounds of a hundred wars, which the Sphinx carries, were inflicted by Napoleon's soldiers, who used its mystifying and majestic countenance as a target. That, however, is only a legend for the tourist. Long before the discovery of gunpowder, the Arabs had laid iconoclastic hands on the beard of this god of the desert..." Though the Arab guides may have originally spread this tale, this myth appears to have been perpetuated over the years by countless teachers the world over who have passed this bit of "history" on to their students. This error has persisted in spite of the fact that the truth can be readily found in such common reference sources as the Encyclopedia Americana (Danbury, CT: Grolier, 1995). vol.25, p.492-3 under "Sphinx", which states: "Over the centuries the Great Sphinx has suffered severely from weathering ... Man has been responsible for additional mutilation. In 1380 A.D. the Sphinx fell victim to the iconoclastic ardor, of a fanatical Muslim ruler, who caused deplorable injuries to the head. In National Geographic , April 1991, page 36, Mark Lehner, an archaeologist from Chicago's Oriental Institute who created a computer reconstruction of the Sphinx, writes: "I sought clues from history and archaeology for the computer reconstruction of the Sphinx. An early 15th-century Arab historian reported that the face had been disfigured in his time. Yet to this day the damage is wrongly attributed to Napoleon's troops." Again, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2001. Vol. 1, p. 30) also states of the perpetrator of the missing nose, "This accusation is most often leveled at Napoleon Bonaparte, who is said to have shot the nose off the Sphinx -- a claim that is manifestly incorrect, not only because earlier western representations of the Sphinx depict it with its nose missing (for example, the drawing published in 1755 by Frederick Norden) but also because medieval Arabic texts attribute the dam age to a Muslim fanatic in the fourteenth century AD." according to Makr. Back to Dispatch July 2002 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com