I'm on mobile so a long answer is tough. But I have one tidbit you'll hopefully find interesting.

By many accounts, Napoleon (around the end of the 1700's) was very interested in the pyramids. Various stories say he went in the Great Pyramid himself, although these accounts are contradicted by at least one source.

There is a quote that comes from Napoleon during the "Battle of the Pyramids" (during which he defeated the Mamluks, a major blow to their 7-century control of the area).

Seeking to rally his troops against the larger Mamluk force, and seeing the pyramids within eyesight, Napoleon is said to have yelled, "Forward! Remember that from those monuments yonder forty centuries look down upon you."

So, at least it is fair to say that Napoleon had some sense of the history surrounding the Pyramids.

Source: "The Campaigns of Napoleon," by David Chandler.

Well, if you want before, here is a passage from Frontinus' De aquaeductu (I.16):

With such an array of indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle Pyramids or the useless, though famous, works of the Greeks!

This immediately followed a section describing the size and scale of a particular Roman aqueduct. Given that he leapt to the Pyramids as a standard comparison, it is reasonable to conclude that they were generally thought of as large and impressive structures, which, I suppose, makes sense.

/u/BullsLawDan pointed to Napoleon. I'll expand on it. The antiquity of Egypt was both known and a subject of curiosity well before 1900; it was, after all, intimately connected to the Classical Mediterranean. But Napoleon, in his expedition to Egypt, took a veritable college of scholars with him to catalogue ancient and modern Egypt. The result was the Description de l'Egypte, a monumental work in either its original or revised editions, that appeared from 1809 onward and made an enormous mark on European thinking about ancient Egypt. It is not out of line to say that modern Egyptology was born with the Napoleonic Wars.

Note too that the French arranged to get antiquities out of Egypt, while the British took some for themselves after a joint Anglo-Ottoman force retook control, further stoking interest. Timothy Mitchell talks about some of this in his Colonising Egypt but is more focused on modern matters. During the 19th century, several obelisks left Egypt for European capitals, donated by the Khedives (long story there) in recognition of European friendship but also to articulate a certain parity that, nevertheless, was moot after 1882 when the British took effective though unofficial control of the country.