?Napoleon’s innocence of breaking the “sphinx’s nose”.. Who is the real one that did this

Akmal elnashar

“The sphinx’s nose” and the one who caused its fracture is one of the most controversial topics, there were a lot of rumors about who caused it, so who was the reason behind the destruction of this historic statue?

The sphinx is considered one of the most important historical and tourist attractions in the world, it’s a statue of a legendary creature with a lion’s body and human head carved with limestone, it’s said that it was originally carved with a layer of plaster and coloured, and the traces of the original colours and still visible next to one of its ears. Because of the large and important value of the statue, many people tried to exploit the fact of its broken nose to spread rumours and gossip about who broke its nose, some people accused the British and German armies that entered Egypt during the first and second world wars of doing this, experts have denied the rumours according to the image of the statue without nose since 1886.

As for the accusation of Napoleon Bonaparte and his armies of deliberately breaking the nose of the statue during the French campaign against Egypt in 1798, these accounts were refuted based on the information of the historians who confirmed that the paintings left by the European explorer, Frederick Lewis, in 1737, showed it without a nose, it showed it without a nose in a shape similar to its current shape. The account of one of the Egyptian historians, the Maqrizi historian, the fifteenth century, denies these accusations, claiming that the destruction of the statue was a fanatical Sufi named Mohammed Saem Al-dahr, and this sheikh campaigned to remove evil things and images, and “the sphinx” at the head of them. He did his best to destroy it, until he was enough by maiming its mouth and nose, the statue remained so to this day, and as a punishment for his act, in 1378 the local people beat him to death.