Why are we so fascinated by ancient Egypt?

Most Americans couldn’t name the current president of Egypt and many would be hard-pressed to name anything that’s happened in Egypt in the last 30 years — or maybe 3,000 years. (It’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Egypt" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Abdel Fatah el-Sisi</a>, and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13315719" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">plenty</a> has happened.) But they know about mummies and pyramids and King Tut, and probably even hieroglyphs — an obsolete form of writing from a distant culture that hasn’t existed for more than 1,600 years. This fascination has been around for a long time. In fact there’s a word for it: Egyptomania. It first infected the West when <a href="https://napoleon.lindahall.org/learn.shtml" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Napoleon invaded Egypt</a> in 1798, bringing 167 scholars with him, including the future director of the Louvre Museum. They returned to France with the first scientific understanding of ancient Egypt, if not the boatloads of antiquities they had intended to take with them. (Most of those went to the British Museum, in London, after the British Army kicked the French out of Egypt and seized the obelisks, statues, and other loot — including the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Rosetta Stone</a> — as spoils of war.) <a href="https://medium.com/minneapolis-institute-of-art/why-are-we-so-fascinated-by-ancient-egypt-50d59295c820">Website</a>