Egypt has loomed large
in the Western imagination in the
Greek and
Hebrew traditions. Egypt was already 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 to Roman and post-Roman European culture through the lens of
Hellenistic conceptions of it, until the decipherment of
Egyptian hieroglyphics by
Jean-François Champollion in the 1820s rendered Egyptian texts legible.