The first member of the French National Institute to visit Upper Egypt and report his discoveries was Denon, who had independently joined Generals Louis Desaix and Auguste Belliard in the pursuit of the Mamelukes. During the course of the arduous campaign, he made over 200 drawings of panoramic scenes and monuments. The artist attempted to give various sites a place in the chronological development of art history based on his judgment of the aesthetic merit of each.

Though zealous, Denon and his associates made some egregious errors. The monuments, which they found most impressive and therefore concluded must be quite ancient, like the temple at Dendera, actually dated from the Greco-Roman era. The scholars' inability to read hieroglyphic writing hampered their historical conclusions. Ironically, discovery of the famous Rosetta Stone, which would later hold the key to the ancient language, was completely serendipitous. A military engineer working on fortifications in El-Rashid (Rosetta) in the Delta found the stele, and the scholars immediately grasped its significance. They took it to the Institute, made numerous copies, and began to translate the Greek portion of the inscription. At the end of the occupation, the British, too, recognized the artifact's value, and claimed it in the official negotiations for French withdrawal.

Originally published in the Journal of Napoleonic Scholarship 1998: Volume 1, Number 2, a publication of the International Napoleonic Society