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I ran into the following sentence in a book.
"Napoleon's expedition to Egypt embraced both soldiers and scientific and scholarly experts."
Does this sentence mean that:
by taking an expedition to Egypt, Napoleon accepted both Egypt soldiers who surrendered to him and Egypt experts who were willing to serve him?
Or
Napoleon took both soldiers and experts with him from his own country to go to attack Egypt?
It means the latter: the expedition included soldiers, scientists, and scholars. Using the word embraced suggests that neither the soldiers nor the scholars were an afterthought, but each were considered an important part of the expedition. (with more context it's possible that the sentence means something else, but as-is, this seems most likely)
It means the latter. Here is the opening of an article about it:
On July 1, 1798, Napoleon landed in Egypt with 400 ships and 54,000 men and proceeded to invade the country, as he had recently invaded Italy. But this Egyptian invasion was to be different. For, in addition to soldiers and sailors, Napoleon brought along 150 savants — scientists, engineers and scholars whose responsibility was to capture, not Egyptian soil, but Egyptian culture and history. And while the military invasion was an ultimate failure, the scholarly one was successful beyond anyone’s expectations. Napoloeon and the scientific Expeditions to egypt
Here is a definition of embrace that explains the meaning:
to include something, often as one of a number of things
