Richard Lepsius, a biography

A BIOGRAPHY BY G E O R G E B E R S TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY ZOE DANA UNDERHILL WITH FRONTISPIECE —AUTHORIZED EDITION— NEW YORK WILLIAM S. GOTTSBERGER, PUBLISHER 11 MURRAY STREET 1887 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1887 by William S. Gottsberger in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington

My dear Johannes!
To you shall this biography be dedicated. As the eldest pupil of our master you have in a certain sense a right to it. From many conversations with you, and from your letters since his death, I have seen with what cheerful alacrity you were always prepared to recognize the great qualities of our Lepsius; and how often, behind your back, has the departed spoken warmly to me of your enthusiastic and self-sacrificing devotion to our science.
Accept this offering, then, as a slight countervailing gift for the many donations which you have bestowed upon me and every Egyptologist. Imitating the master’s example you have followed him to Egypt, and there, like him, undertaken the task of disclosing to your colleagues at home the wealth of unexplored inscriptions in which the temples and tombs of the Nile valley are still so rich. From hundreds of walls you have copied the pictorial and hieroglyphic decorations, and made them accessible for investigation by collecting them in convenient volumes. A stately row of folios,—yonder they stand and each contains cordial words which assure me of your faithful remembrance,—bears witness to your industry, the acuteness of your eye and intellect, and the precision of your hand. But few know what great sacrifices of comfort, sleep, health, and your own property, lie hidden within these volumes, for without assistance worth mentioning, either from the government or its chiefs, you, relying upon yourself alone, have achieved great results. You were aided by no firmans to afford you protection, no powerful patron to assume the cost of publication, no helpful fellow-traveller, as for years you made your way up the Nile far into the Sudān. Month after month have you been a self-invited guest of the god to whom the sanctuary of your choice was dedicated, you have passed the nights on a hard couch in a chamber of the temple which you desired to examine, and shared their scanty meal with the Arabs. To me it will ever be incomprehensible whence you derived the endurance to copy, through weeks of labor, the inscriptions on the walls of the tomb of Petuamenapt, the so-called bat sepulchre, while those misshapen creatures which dread the day extinguished your lights, flapped about you in swarms, and entangled themselves in that magnificent beard which procured for you among the Arabs the name of Abu Dakn (Father of the Beard).