When Napoleon invaded Egypt he opened it up to a wave of Western exploration that the country had never known. Soon after his defeat there, many European countries sent consuls to Egypt with one major goal: bring back amazing antiquities—and that is exactly what they did.
The man who oversaw Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, Mohammed Ali, was eager to seek Western European help in modernizing his country. He, and most Muslims of the time, also viewed the ancient Egyptian monuments as relics of abominable paganism. So he was happy to trade monuments for modernization, and a flood of artifacts flowed from Egypt into European museums, creating the foundation for some of the greatest museums of the world, such as the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Berlin Museum. In one of the most interesting twists of history, this movement of artifacts would bring the Book of Abraham to Joseph Smith.
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