The Arabic roots of the Statue of Liberty go back to Egypt, when its sculptor Fredric Auguste Bartholdi, influenced by Egypt’s great monuments and pyramids, was commissioned to create a statue to be called the “Statue of Progress” for the entrance of the Suez Canal, according to the following excerpt taken from the book The Statue of Liberty by Marvin Trachtenberg, Viking Press, 1976: “Frederic Auguste Bartholdi in 1856 accompanied Leon Gerome, Bally, and Berchere – a group of orientalist painters – on a long trip to Egypt, a fashionable undertaking at the time. Bartholdi, very serious about the trip, not only made a number of remarkably good photographs (then becoming the rage), but took careful note of the great monuments that had drawn him on so long a journey. And it was this voyage up the Nile that seems to really have brought out his latent attraction to the colossal classical sculpture.