The Myth That Blamed Napoleon For A Broken Nose

Everyone knows Napoleon’s soldiers shot the nose off the Sphinx. Cannonball practice. Bored troops. The arrogance of a European army defacing a 4,500-year-old monument. It never happened. A Danish naval captain named Frederic Louis Norden visited Egypt in 1737 and drew the Sphinx in meticulous detail. The drawing — published in 1755 — clearly shows the Sphinx without a nose. Napoleon did not arrive in Egypt until 1798. The nose had been missing for at least 61 years before a single French soldier set foot in the country. Napoleon, in fact, brought 167 scientists and scholars with him specifically to study and document Egypt’s ancient monuments. His expedition produced La Description de l’Égypte — the founding document of modern Egyptology. The man blamed for destroying the Sphinx actually kickstarted the science of preserving it. So who took the nose?

The Horror

The 15th-century Arab historian al-Maqrizi recorded the answer. In 1378, a Sufi mystic named Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr observed local peasants making offerings to the Sphinx — burning incense, leaving food, praying to the ancient stone face for good harvests and favourable Nile floods. The Sphinx had been standing for nearly 4,000 years. The peasants had been praying to it for centuries. Al-Dahr was outraged. This was idolatry — the worship of a stone image, forbidden by his faith. He decided to prove that the Sphinx had no power. He climbed the monument with chisels and hammers and attacked the face. He destroyed the nose. Some accounts say he also damaged the ears. He disfigured the most recognisable face in the ancient world to demonstrate that it was nothing but stone. When he climbed back down, the peasants were waiting. According to al-Maqrizi, al-Dahr was seized by the locals — the same people whose offerings he had tried to stop. He was beaten, and then executed. The method varies by account — hanged, stoned, or lynched. The peasants who had prayed to the Sphinx for good harvests offered it something new: the blood of the man who had defaced it. The locals believed the increased sand covering the Giza Plateau in subsequent years was the Sphinx’s revenge — divine punishment for the destruction of its face.

The Modern Relic

The Great Sphinx still sits on the Giza Plateau — 4,500 years old, 240 feet long, 66 feet tall, missing a nose that has been gone for 648 years. The chisel marks are still visible on the face — two insertion points, one at the bridge of the nose and one below the nostril, where rods were hammered in and the stone pried off. Archaeological examination by Mark Lehner in the 1980s confirmed the nose was deliberately removed — not eroded, not shot, not broken by accident. The myth blaming Napoleon was probably invented by British writers looking to discredit the French. It spread because it was a good story — a simple villain, a famous monument, and an act of imperial vandalism. The truth is less cinematic: a religious zealot with a chisel, a population who killed him for it, and a nose that has been lying somewhere in the sand of Giza — or ground to powder — for six and a half centuries. Napoleon gets the blame in every pub quiz on Earth. Al-Dahr gets a footnote. The nose gets nothing.

← Back to the archive