Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination

The culture of Ancient Egypt has fascinated outsiders from its own day well into our own, long after that culture was subsumed first by Greco-Roman, then Christian, then Muslim currents. And while the concept of the "Western world" owes its origin to Christian writers of early medieval Europe and Asia Minor, those same writers were keen to imagine themselves as part of—or heirs to—a cultural continuum that began with classical antiquity and evolved to include the Biblical history of the Jews.

In Western cultures' collective imaginings, the idea of "Ancient Egypt" has developed and changed over millennia no less than those cultures themselves changed. From classical and late antiquity through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and into the modern era, this imagined "Egypt" has served as a powerful symbol, variously representing profound antiquity, esoteric wisdom, evil, the exotic, or timeless grandeur.

An essential factor in Ancient Egypt's enduring mystery and remoteness was that scribes no longer studied to acquire literacy in Egyptian hieroglyphs, resulting in the script being totally inscrutable from roughly the 5th century CE until their decipherment in the early 19th century, during which Egypt's own recorded history was rendered inaccessible. The continuing engagement of nations and societies that constitute "the West" with Egypt has shaped their art, literature, architecture, philosophy, and popular culture. This influence in turn reflects those societies' contemporary intellectual currents, colonial ambitions, and religious and spiritual ideas in addition to—or instead of—an understanding grounded in historical fact.