For nearly fifteen hundred years all direct knowledge of the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians had been lost, and nothing more was known of the monuments of the time of the Pharaohs than was incidentally mentioned by classic authors, or travellers who had visited the Orient. It is true that in Rome and Constantinople stood obelisks which had been transported to the imperial residences from the temples of the Nile, while mummies and smaller Egyptian relics were preserved as curiosities in the libraries and museums of Europe. But the interest in the life of the ancient Egyptians, as well as in their art and science, which had enjoyed such a high degree of esteem amongst the Greeks, had been lost. And although, after the prime of the humanities had faded, an Athanasius Kircher,[12] and after him other scholars such as the Dane Zoega or Barthélemy, ventured to attempt the deciphering of the inscriptions with which the Roman obelisks were covered, yet they were soon forced to desist from their fruitless endeavors, for want of any fixed basis from which they might have prosecuted their difficult operations with success. Then the First Consul of the French Republic, General Napoleon Bonaparte, undertook that adventurous march into Egypt by which he hoped to break up English influence on African soil, to cut off the nearest route to India from the British armies, and also to gather laurels for himself. “For,” he had said, “the greatest glory in the world is only to be won in the Orient.” Every one knows the course of this campaign, which indeed ended in favor of England, but brought far greater fame to France than to her opponent. History does not forget such battles as that beneath the pyramids, and in the annals of science a place of honor will ever be accorded to the intellectual achievements of the French scholars who, during the end of the previous and the beginning of our own century, followed the French armies amidst a thousand hardships, dangers, and adverse circumstances. It was by means of this expedition that the life of the old Egyptians was to celebrate its resurrection. No one in Europe had suspected what a wealth of monuments of the time of the Pharaohs had been preserved upon the Nile. People watched with astonishment the arrival in Paris of great folios full of superb drawings in which these were depicted, and numerous volumes containing the descriptions of them. Excellent reproductions of both afterwards found their way all over the world.