Napoleon's soldiers did not shoot the nose off the Sphinx.

1378 · 1737 · 1798 · apart: 420 years

It is already missing in Frederic Norden's drawings from 1737, and the historian al-Maqrizi wrote that a zealot defaced the statue in 1378.

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The event

• Battle of the Pyramids1798 · Embabeh. Napoleon Bonaparte's army routed Murad Bey's Mamluk cavalry and occupied Cairo. The scholars who accompanied the campaign, and the Rosetta Stone found by its soldiers, launched Egyptology and paved the way for growing European influence in the Middle East.

14th century · 18th century

More amazing facts

• 1373 · 1386 · 1943 An alliance made in the 14th century was invoked in the Second World War. In 1943 Portugal, citing its treaties with England of 1373 and 1386, let the British use bases in the Azores.
• 1377 · 1450 Korean monks printed the Jikji with movable metal type in 1377, some 70 years before Gutenberg's press.
• 1377 The first quarantine lasted thirty days, not forty.
• 1377 Robin Hood first appears as the hero of songs known to a lazy priest.
• 1377 · 1401 The great historian Ibn Khaldun met Tamerlane.
• 1378 · 1409 In 1409 Catholics had three popes at once.

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