Karl Richard Lepsius

LEPSIUS, KARL RICHARD (1810—I 884) , German Egyptologist, was born at Naumburg-am-Saale on Dec. 23, 181o. He studied at Leipzig, and at G6ttingen, where, under the influence of Otfried Muller, he finally decided to devote himself to the archaeological side of philology. After graduating doctor in Berlin in 1833, he went to Paris, where he was commissioned by the duc de Luynes to collect material from the Greek and Latin writers for his work on the weapons of the ancients. In 1834 he took the Volney prize with his Paldographie als Mittel der Sprachforschung. Befriended by Bunsen and Humboldt, Lepsius took up Egypto logical studies, which, since the death of Champollion in 1832, had attracted no scholar of eminence and weight. After four years spent in studying the Egyptian collections of Italy, Holland and England, he returned to Germany, where Humboldt and Bunsen secured for his projected visit to Egypt the status of a scientific expedition with royal support. For three years Lepsius and his party explored the region from the Sudan above Khartum to the Syrian coast. At the end of 1845 they returned home, bringing with them casts, drawings and squeezes of inscriptions and scenes, maps and plans collected with the utmost thoroughness, as well as antiquities and papyri.

In 1846

Lepsius received a chair in Berlin University. In 1859. the 12 volumes of his vast Denkmaler aus A gypten and Athiopien were finished, supplemented later by a text prepared from the note-books of the expedition; they comprise its entire archaeolog ical, palaeographical and historical results. In 1866 Lepsius again went to Egypt, and discovered the famous Decree of Tanis or Table of Canopus, an inscription of the same character as the Rosetta Stone, in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. In 1873 he was appointed keeper of the Royal Library, Berlin, which, like the Berlin Museum, owes much to his care. He died at Berlin on July 1884. Besides the colossal Denkmdler and other publications of texts such as the Todtenbuch der Agypter (Book of the Dead, 1842) his other works, amongst which may be specially named his Kdnigsbuch der Agypter (1858) and Chronologie der Agypter (1849), retain permanent value.

See

Richard Lepsius, by Georg Ebers (New York, 1887), and art. EGYPT, section Exploration and Research.