Egypt in the European imagination

Egypt in the Western imagination has loomed large from the very first written texts in the Greek and Hebrew traditions. Egypt was already immemorially ancient to outsiders, and the idea of Egypt as a figment of the Western imagination has continued to be at least as influential in the history of ideas as the actual historical Egypt itself. All Egyptian culture was transmitted through the lens of Hellenistic conceptions of it, until the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Champollion in the 1820s.
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