Napoleon's plan was for his army to arrive in Egypt not as conquerors but liberators. Landing in Aboukir Bay on July 1, 1798, the French captured Alexandria the next day, overcoming the surprised Mamelukes - the despotic local rulers - with a combination of modern artillery and infantry tactics. In a proclamation distributed in Arabic, Napoleon declared that he was a defender of Islam, come to liberate the Egyptians from tyranny. He took advantage of the fact that most revolutionary French soldiers were deists or atheists to suggest that this meant they were in fact "Muslims" - "with a small 'm,' " as Cole points out - because their rejection of the Trinity meant they had "submitted to the one God." In the conquests, the French built hospitals, bridges, and roads on the Nile. They further modernized Egypt by bringing books and soon printing them in Arabic characters. With this, Napoleon's military conquest becomes a scientific exploration and the beginning of modern Egyptology.
Bonaparte brought more than 250 young engineers, historians, scientists, and painters to carry out a complete description of the country through culture, architecture, fauna, and flora. This deployment of intellectual resources is considered as an indication of Napoleon's devotion to the principles of the Enlightenment. These scholars included engineers and artists, members of the Commission des Sciences et des Arts, the geologist Dolomieu, Henri-Joseph Redouté, the mathematician Gaspard Monge (a founding member of the École polytechnique), the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet, Vivant Denon, the mathematician Jean-Joseph Fourier (who did some of the empirical work upon which his "analytical theory of heat" was founded in Egypt), the physicist Étienne Malus, the naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the botanist Alire Raffeneau-Delile, and the engineer Nicolas-Jacques Conté of the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers.