Did Napoleon's Soldiers Shoot the Nose Off the Sphinx?
The image is almost too good: French artillerymen, bored in the desert, using a seven-thousand-year-old wonder for target practice. It shows up in trivia lists, museum captions, and at least one Ridley Scott movie. It's also one of the more widely "debunked" pieces of Egypt trivia — plenty of pages will tell you the nose was already gone before Napoleon arrived. Fewer of them show the actual evidence for that, or notice that the evidence itself doesn't agree with itself.
The claim
During France's 1798–1801 military campaign in Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte's soldiers used the Great Sphinx of Giza's face for cannon target practice, destroying its nose.
Source trail
Nobody we found could point to when this story first started circulating — it isn't attached to a named source in any of the pages we checked. What we did find is evidence of how old and how ordinary the story already was by the 20th century, and, running the other direction, a set of 18th-century travelers' drawings that the modern debunking pages lean on to disprove it — two of which turn out to disagree with each other.
What's confirmed
- The story was already treated as accepted lore, not a live debate, by World War II. London's National Army Museum's own collection page (checked 2026-08-22) holds a photograph taken around 1942 by a British officer touring Cairo before deployment to the desert, captioned in his own album: "The Sphynx [sic]. Napoleon is reputed to have shot off his nose with a cannon-ball." The museum's own note on the same page calls this "a myth." The photo doesn't prove anything about 1798 — but it's a dated, sourced data point showing the tale was already a stock line for foreign visitors nearly 150 years after the fact, not a recent internet-era invention.
- Two European travelers sketched the Sphinx in the very same year, 1737 — six decades before Napoleon set foot in Egypt in 1798 — and their drawings disagree with each other. Danish naval captain Frederic Louis Norden's sketches, published posthumously in 1755 (French) and 1757 (English, as Travels in Egypt and Nubia, digitized copy confirmed on archive.org, checked 2026-08-22), show the Sphinx with no nose. Irish clergyman Richard Pococke's engraving, published a few years later in A Description of the East — the plate itself dated 1745 in its own file record on Wikimedia Commons, checked 2026-08-22 — shows the nose intact. Both predate Napoleon by 53–61 years no matter which one is more trustworthy, which already rules out cannon fire in 1798. But the two don't agree with each other, which is the more interesting finding — see "What isn't" below for why Norden's version is the one debunking pages actually rely on.
- A second, independent European sighting of the missing nose predates even Norden by nearly two centuries. The Napoleonic-history reference site napoleon-series.org's own FAQ (checked 2026-08-22) states that French naturalist Dr. Pierre Belon recorded the nose as already missing during his travels in 1546 — 252 years before Napoleon's arrival, and independent of the Norden/Pococke pair entirely.
- Medieval Arabic historiography names a specific person, act, and date for the damage — more than four centuries before Napoleon. Wikipedia's own Great Sphinx of Giza article (checked 2026-08-22), citing 15th-century Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi, states that a Sufi named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr defaced the statue's face in 1378 CE as an act of religious iconoclasm, after finding local peasants making agricultural offerings to it. A separate small independent site focused specifically on ancient-Egypt folklore, catchpenny.org (checked 2026-08-22), cites the same account back to a specific published edition of al-Maqrizi's own text — al-Mawa'iz wa al-i'tibar, the 1913 Vienna edition, volume 2, page 157.
What isn't
- Nobody we checked names when or how the Napoleon-cannon story itself actually started. Every debunking page we read, including napoleon-series.org's own FAQ, states plainly that the story is false and moves straight to the counter-evidence — none names a first book, article, or traveler's account that actually originated the claim. The earliest dated appearance we found is the ~1942 museum photograph above, and that only documents the tale already circulating as settled folklore, not its origin. We looked at Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1886 painting Bonaparte Before the Sphinx (checked 2026-08-22) as a possible candidate, since it's the best-known artwork pairing Napoleon with the monument — but its own Wikipedia article doesn't depict or reference cannon fire or the nose at all, so we are not asserting any connection between that painting and this specific myth.
- Pococke's "intact nose" drawing looks like it wasn't drawn from life. Multiple sources found this session state that Pococke's 1743–45 plate closely follows an earlier engraving by Dutch traveler Cornelis de Bruijn, published in 1698 — also showing an intact nose — down to matching incidental details. If Pococke's version derives from de Bruijn's rather than from Pococke's own 1737 observation, it isn't independent evidence the nose was intact that year at all. We did not independently fetch de Bruijn's 1698 original to confirm the resemblance ourselves this session; this rests on secondary description, not our own side-by-side comparison of the two plates.
- Even the debunking page we found most useful disagrees with itself on the al-Dahr date. napoleon-series.org's own FAQ, fetched directly, gives two different years for the same 1378-CE event in two different places on the same page: "1378 A.D.," attributed to historians Makrizi and Rashidi, and "1380 A.D.," attributed separately to an Encyclopedia Americana entry it also quotes. The page does not reconcile the two-year gap between its own cited sources.
- Al-Maqrizi's account also says the ears were destroyed, which doesn't match what's visible on the statue today. catchpenny.org, fetched directly, notes this discrepancy itself: the Sphinx still shows remnants of both ears, in apparent tension with a contemporary account that describes them as demolished along with the nose. We did not find a source that resolves this, including catchpenny.org, which raises the point and leaves it open.
- We did not independently read al-Maqrizi's own text. The 1913 Vienna edition catchpenny.org cites was not fetched or checked by us this session — our confirmation of the al-Dahr/1378 account rests on Wikipedia's own article and catchpenny.org's citation of the edition, not on the primary Arabic-language source itself.
Verdict
Napoleon's troops did not shoot the nose off the Sphinx — on that, every source checked agrees, and the timeline leaves no real room for doubt: multiple independent sightings of a noseless Sphinx predate 1798 by anywhere from 53 to 252 years. Who actually did it is less settled than the confident "1378, a Sufi named al-Dahr" answer that circulates online suggests: the account traces to one medieval historian, writing decades after the fact, whose own modern citation disagrees with itself on the year, and whose claim about the ears doesn't match the statue as it stands. Even the physical evidence used to clear Napoleon has a wrinkle nobody flags — the one drawing from 1737 that shows an intact nose looks like a copy of an even older picture, not a fresh look at the monument.