They would publish their findings in a monumental multivolume work -

The Description Of Egypt.

It documented this lost world

and its as-yet-undeciphered hieroglyphics

for the tantalisation of the West.

Napoleon's team of experts also fuelled an archaeological race

to unearth the treasures of the ancient world.

Many of those treasures

ended up in the new museums of Europe and North America.

Displayed in the Enlightenment spirit of learning,

for the betterment of a wider public.

In the capitals of Europe, Napoleon's mission

spawned a new fascination with the art of ancient Egypt.

But Napoleon's invasion had had another purpose -

not only to uncover the secrets of ancient Egypt,

but also to impose European civilisation

on the living, contemporary Egypt.

Armed with a library of books and a printing press,

Napoleon wanted to re-educate

an Islamic world that Europeans had long seen as the enemy,

a civilisation they considered to have lost its way.

Ultimately, Napoleon's occupation

would fail at the hands of the British.

But, in a curious twist,

Europeans became increasingly obsessed

with the very culture Napoleon had tried to change.

Or more accurately,

their imagined fantasy of what that culture was.

Soon artists began to travel throughout the Islamic world

to paint the exotic places and people they encountered.

This is the painting

that inspired an entire genre of 19th century European art -

Orientalism.

It's the work of the French artist Eugene Delacroix

who painted it in the 1830s,

after he'd actually gone on a visit to Algeria,

which had recently been conquered and colonised by France.

And this is the first real serious attempt

to portray ordinary life in the Islamic world.