Napoleon and the Sphinx
The nose of the Sphinx ..
As known, in Egypt, as a rule, an official guide is assigned to each tourist group. These guides, having obtained a three-year minilaurea, are very good at illustrating the monuments visited and the main inscriptions, but, unfortunately, they often lack an overview. On my first trip as a tourist to Egypt, in the eighties, we were accompanied by a very pretty young woman - she resembled in an impressive way the 'harp player' of the paint in the tomb of Nakht in Thebes - but who was very chauvinistic and full of culture Islamic. The young lady, in front of the Sphinx, argued emphatically that the face had been disfigured by the cannonades of Napoleon's troops. Instead, it was precisely the Mamlouk Muslims who performed this vandalism (even though the thing, at the helm, was not good!).
The proof is given by a letter, written by an abbot to Louis XV and preserved in the historical archives of Paris, in which, according to the use of time, he relates the sovereign on a trip to Egypt and says:
Near the pyramids, from the sand, a splendid face of a man emerges on a body of hyena (sic!). Too bad that he lacks the nose and the beard!
Napoleon was undoubtedly one of the greatest thieves in history. Wherever he went, he took away everything he could, however, precisely because he appreciated its value. And these guides forget that he was the one who sent the first group of scholars who surveyed and surveyed all the monuments in Egypt and that from this initiative was born, later, with Mariette, the first museum in Cairo and the archaeological history of Egypt, which today constitutes the main source of income for the country. Of course, it is much more convenient to attribute vandalism to a foreigner than to one's own ancestors.
However, the truth is another!
