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Interest in the ruins of ancient Egypt was ignited in 1798 when Napoleon Bonaparte was dispatched on a military expedition to wrest Egypt from Turkish control. The intention, primarily, was to frustrate British trade in the eastern Mediterranean and with India, but alongside the 38,000 troops were 150 scholars, including Gaspard Monge, who went on to explain mirages, and Nicolas Conté, who invented the graphite pencil and established a pencil factory in Cairo to supply his colleagues. Although Napoleon's expedition was a military failure, it was an academic success, culminating in the discovery of the celebrated Rosetta Stone.

Defeat by the British meant that the Rosetta Stone was ultimately handed over to the British Museum, where it has remained ever since. The French scholars returned to France with whatever antiquities they were allowed to keep, along with a vast library of sketches and transcriptions.

One of the most senior academics to accompany the Egyptian expedition was Joseph Fourier, who achieved fame as a physicist and mathematician. On his return to France, Fourier passed on his enthusiasm for the civilisation of ancient Egypt to a young boy in Grenoble. That boy, Jean-François Champollion, declared that one day he would decipher the mysterious script that adorned the Egyptian ornaments that had been brought back to France.

Decades later, when Champollion had cracked the hieroglyphic code, he was able to read the script on the ornaments in the Louvre and to arrange the collection into historical order, putting all the antiquities into context.

Rival curators looked on enviously. Because hieroglyphs are so beautiful, the Egyptians wrote upon many of the objects they crafted, whereas the Roman vases and sculptures were comparatively free of script. It would take the curators of the Roman and other collections many more decades before they could make sense of their galleries.