Napoleon's efforts to conquer Egypt beginning in 1798 led to a modern interest in Egyptian archaeology and culture. Many of the relics taken by the scientists and researchers allied with Napoleon's army ended up in the British Museum (Steindorff and Seele 1). The discovery by the French of the Rosetta stone led to the translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The text of the stone, which was a proclamation honoring Ptolemy V Epiphanes, was written in Greek, in the common Egyptian demotic script, and in pictographic Egyptian hieroglyphs. Translators were able to use the Greek and demotic texts to decipher the hieroglyphs (Steindorff and Seele 1-2) In fact, the Rosetta stone has become a metaphor for things which are key to understanding a subject. The image to the left uses hieroglyphs to spell the word "myth."

In the same way that Mesopotamian culture developed around the Tigris-Euphrates, Egyptian culture developed around the Nile. The ancient Egyptians depended on the annual flooding of the Nile to provide irrigation for crops. Again, human life and culture were closely linked to the cycles of nature.