Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination

The culture of ancient Egypt has fascinated outsiders from its own day well into the modern day, 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.

Source: Wikipedia — Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination (CC BY-SA 4.0)