Bunsen knew how to value the labors of the new member of the board of directors and editing secretary of the Institute, and Lepsius soon felt at home in the inspiring atmosphere of his house.
The Ambassador and Gerhard both successfully exerted their influence in Berlin to induce the Academy, which was already well disposed towards the first critically trained German Egyptologist, to grant him additional assistance. It would be impossible to imagine help more energetic, more disinterested, or more efficacious, than that which Lepsius thus received from Bunsen. The hundreds of letters before us, addressed by the former to his patron, show how the relation between them became continually more intimate and cordial. The superscription changes by degrees from “Highly Honored Herr Minister,” to “Dearest Herr Privy Counselor,” “My Dear, Fatherly Friend,” and finally, “Most Highly Esteemed Friend.” When the young scholar writes to his beloved patron on special occasions, his letters, usually calm and confined to the matter in hand, acquire a heartiness and warmth otherwise alien to them. He once wrote to Bunsen on his birthday (1839): “My heartiest thanks for your splendid letter of August twenty-second, and for the delightful lines which I received yesterday. May the Lord grant you his most abundant blessing in the new year of your life just beginning, as in all that follow, and preserve to me your fatherly affection, which has already so often strengthened, encouraged, and refreshed me. I have far greater need of you, and am more dependent on you than it may appear to you. I feel it with every sheet that I receive from your hand, and that surprises me unawares in my disposition to triviality, timidity, and every sort of narrow-mindedness. Your words, even the most unimportant, fall like pearls upon my poverty, and I feed upon them from one letter to another.”
With what sincerity these ardent phrases were meant is evident from Lepsius’ letters to his father and mother, in which he always speaks of Bunsen with enthusiasm and child-like affection.
Even in after years Lepsius’ eye would still kindle, his measured speech grow fervent, when he recalled Charles Bunsen, the inexhaustible wealth of his ideas, the depth of his knowledge, the purity of his character, and the friendship which united the statesman and investigator, though twenty years the older, with the aspiring scholar; which only gained in strength from year to year, survived the death of the one, and was borne to the grave with the other.
Bunsen had the advantage of Lepsius in a rich, poetic, soaring imagination, otherwise they had many great qualities in common.
Frederick William IV. had honored Bunsen with the title of baron. Apart from this, however, he, like Lepsius, deserves to be designated as a genuine noble German freeman; that is, a man of unalterable intrinsic superiority, who derives the right to carry his head loftily, not from external circumstances, but from honest, indefatigable, difficult, and conscientious work. To such labor they both remained faithful through all the circumstances of life, and when we see the leaders of a turbulent party claiming the name of “workman” exclusively for the man with horny hands, and exerting themselves to restrict within the narrowest limits the hours of employment for the day laborer, we would point to these two men, who free from every material solicitude of life, turned their nights into day, bade defiance to bodily fatigue, and only sought refreshment in change of occupation, in order to fit themselves for the exalted enterprise which they had imposed upon themselves.
His first purely Egyptological paper presents the most brilliant evidence of the zeal and sagacity with which Lepsius, from the beginning, devoted himself to the study of the Egyptian writing and language. It appeared in the annals of the Roman Archaeological Institute, in the shape of a letter to his Pisan friend, Rosellini,[25] and ranks among model works of this kind on account of its wonderful succinctness, clearness and comprehensiveness. Lepsius gives in it a complete summary of the whole system of writing of the ancient Egyptians. He distinguishes, with clearness and acuteness, the elements of which this is composed, and from the Master’s list of sound symbols, which was much too large, he singles out those elements which do not properly belong there, and fortunately rejects one of the fundamental errors of Champollion’s system. As we now know, the phonetic part of hieroglyphics, that is the part relating to sounds, consists simply of letters which were sounded,—our matres lectionis,—and syllabic signs. These by themselves alone can represent a syllable. Thus, the mere picture of a mirror is to be read ‘anch,’ but to this picture may also pertain all the sounds of the syllable which it represents: thus, in our case, an ‘a, n, and ch.’ Champollion, on the contrary, had known nothing of syllabic symbols, and thus regarded the mirror as a mere abbreviation of the word ‘anch,’ which he had also met with written out in full.
This error was done away with by Lepsius,[26] and through him that immensely important element of writing, the syllabic symbol, received its due. The observations contained in this treatise on the relation of Coptic (See page 76) to ancient Egyptian, are also of fundamental value.
Lepsius’ letter to Rosellini gives a critical recapitulation of the discoveries of the Master. It is the first really methodical and scientific work of an adherent of the Champollionic system, and although after this Lepsius only returned incidentally to the linguistic and grammatical side of Egyptology,[27] yet in this work, as everywhere where he planted the lever, he has pointed out the right way and method. In the Nubian Grammar, which was one of the chief works of his life, and which was completed at a late date, he showed how firmly he stood upon the grammatical foundation so early won, and how faithful he remained thenceforth to grammatical studies. He did not cease, too, to work at those studies, regarding the sounds of languages and the alphabet, to which he had early devoted himself. His “Standard Alphabet,”[28] which originated long afterwards and amidst great opposition, was intended chiefly to enable missionaries and travellers to reproduce correctly in our own language the sounds of the foreign tongues examined by them. This was to be done by means of letters, easily and conveniently modified by dashes and dots. It became of great practical importance, as it was adopted by the English “Church Missionary Society” as the most available universal alphabet to be employed, according to their directions, by their emissaries. No one can deny that it is also of scientific value. Its applicability has been specially proved with the African languages, and in this department it has been most successfully employed in a great number of grammatical and lexicographical works, as well as biblical translations and the reproduction of narrations, legends, and proverbs in the various idioms. Of the Hamitic branch of the African languages, which is distinguished by grammatical genders, there are seven side-branches, from the ancient Egyptian to the Haūsa- and Nama- (Namaqua-) languages, which have been thus examined. Of the more remote native African idioms there are not less than twenty-two. In 1874, during the Congress of Orientalists at London, we ourselves were permitted to hold council with him and other leaders of science, concerning an acceptable universal method of transcription for hieroglyphic writing. Many of his propositions were adopted at that time, but the method of transcription agreed on in the British Museum did not become current, and it is undoubtedly in need of much improvement.
Lepsius had already given particular attention to the two special departments in which he was to achieve the greatest and most fruitful results; first at Göttingen, under the superintendence of O. Müller, then in Paris after the publication of Biot’s work, and finally at Rome, in the company of Bunsen. These departments were first, history, with its numerical groundwork of chronology, and in the second place, mythology.