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.