Imagination rules the world.
—Napoleon
The promotional booklet that had come with their tickets showed that the gallery they had just toured was no longer the Sully Wing, but the Denon Wing's sections for sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Italian sculpture and Ancient Greek sculpture.
They went back through the Caryatid Gate they had entered through and headed toward the central square. From here, the glass pyramid was no longer visible.
Long before Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, the French had developed an intense fascination with the pharaohs' land. Of the four great ancient civilizations, ancient Babylon had left behind only the stone-carved Code of Hammurabi, India had fallen under British colonial rule, and conquering Egypt could cut off Britain's sea route to India.
For this expedition, Napoleon had selected his finest troops, while Egypt had fielded its most elite Mamluk cavalry. They rode the finest Arabian horses and wielded the most advanced weapons in the world at the time.
Yet at the battle beneath the pyramids, no matter how bravely the Mamluk cavalry charged, risking their lives, they were still driven back by the French artillery.
To put it crudely, the wheels of history rolled ever onward, and these cavalrymen could not stop them. Unless the people of Egypt found the Scorpion King's Bracelet and summoned an army of the dead.
Napoleon destroyed the Mamluk military aristocracy that had ruled Egypt for centuries, and he also brought modern civilization to Egypt. At the very least, Egypt was far more open than the Middle East.
He brought with him a vast team of scholars and launched massive archaeological excavations, digging up the relics of Ancient Egyptian civilization with almost greedy fervor.
Whether pharaohs' tombs or commoners' graves, they dug them all open. They did not even spare the mummies inside the coffins, turning them