Karl Richard Lepsius
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Karl Richard Lepsius
Pioneering Egyptologist and Archaeologist
23 December 1810
Karl Richard Lepsius was a Prussian archaeological pioneer who advanced studies in Egyptology and Egyptian language understanding. Born in Naumburg in 1810, Lepsius soon moved away to study Greek and Roman archaeology at the universities of Leipzig, Gottingen and Berlin - before setting foot for Paris in 1833, where he would begin to get involved in the deciphering of Egyptian languages alongside scholars such as Jean Letronne; a disciple of Jean-Francois Champollion. Upon Champollion's death in 1832, Lepsius compiled a study of his book, Egyptian Grammar. He managed to expand on Champollion's hieroglyphic efforts, by emphasising that vowels were not written.
By now an esteemed scholar, Lepsius was commissioned by the Prussian king in 1842 to lead an exploratory mission to Egypt and Sudan, to chronicle items of interest much in the same vein as Napoleon's sorties. After working through Nubia and Upper Egypt, Lepsius traveled back north to Thebes in 1844, where he spent four months studying the artefacts of the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu and the Valley of the Kings. He then ventured further north, before returning to Europe in 1846. Lepsius subsequently published Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopa, a massive compendium of 900 plates of Egyptian inscription. Later work continued to chronicle various artefacts, but possibly his best known work was still to come, when he coined the term Totenbuch, or Book of the Dead; the vast series of papyri we now know well. Lepsius spent the majority of his later career studying Egyptian language, producing a standard alphabet for tranliterating African languages before his death in 1884. Today his work lives on in the work of many scholars, and his zeal for the advancement of studies of Egyptian languages continues in the University of Bonn's Totenbuch Project.
