Richard Lepsius, a biography

by Georg Ebers

After the dead had received back all the faculties of the body which he possessed on earth, and when, after the justification in the hall of judgment, he had also received his heart, he advanced from portal to portal, and from degree to degree, until he had attained his final goal, apotheosis. In this last stage the pure spirit of light was freed from all the dust of this life; and then, being one with the sun-god Ra, as a shining day-star, he crossed the heavens in a golden bark, and received, himself a god, the attributes and the reverence of gods and the homage of men. Endowed with the power of clothing himself at will in any form he desired, he was permitted by day or night to sail through the firmament as sun or star in divine light, to mix with mortals upon earth, to soar through the air as a bird, or as a lotos flower, blooming beautifully, to repose in serene blessedness and breathe forth perfume.

As might be expected from what has already been said, in this book are to be found the elements of the Egyptian religious belief and doctrine of immortality. Although these are difficult to understand on account of the inflated mode of expression, as well as the confused superabundance of symbols, allegories, metaphors, and illustrations (unfortunately, these obscure the sense far more frequently than they elucidate it), and although much of it must have been misunderstood by Lepsius at the age of thirty, yet it could not escape him that a searching study of this fundamental book must precede any critical treatment of Egyptian mythology. On this account, as we know, in 1836 he made a copy of the large and very perfect hieroglyphic specimen of the “Book of the Dead,” and amended it during a second sojourn in Turin in 1841. In the year 1842, as we shall see, he published[31] the great roll of papyrus, fifty-seven feet and three inches long. The seventy-nine tablets contained in this fine publication were transferred to the stone by the careful and skillful designer and lithographer, Max Weidenbach, a Naumburg fellow-countryman of Lepsius. This man, as well as his no less skillful brother, certainly deserves mention here, for under the direction of Lepsius they both succeeded in mastering Egyptian writing so thoroughly that their hieroglyphic manuscript was in no respect inferior to that of the best hierogrammatists of the time of the Pharaohs, It is to them that the publications of Lepsius owe the rare purity of style which distinguishes them, and we are indebted above all to the delicate apprehension and the skillful hand of the brothers Weidenbach that the hieroglyphic types which were restored for the Berlin Academy under the superintendence of Lepsius, turned out to be such models of beauty and style, that they are at present universally employed. Even in Paris the types produced in the French government printing office were set aside in their favor.

If at the present day we critically consider Lepsius’ edition of the “Book of the Dead,” we must certainly regret that it had for a basis the Turin copy, which is replete with errors of writing and defects arising from hasty work, and which dates from a comparatively late period. But, on the other hand, we must praise the industry, care and ability with which its editor studied the text before the excellent “preface” was written and the distribution of the whole into chapters was accomplished. This distribution has stood till the present day, and when we now speak of the first, seventeenth and hundred and twenty-fifth chapters as the most important sections of the “Book of the Dead,” in so doing we follow the construction given by Lepsius. In a few months there will be published a collection of the finest texts of the “Book of the Dead” from the best period, prepared by the excellent Genoese Egyptologist, E. Naville, under the auspices of the Berlin Academy. It was Lepsius, again, who gave the impulse to this great and useful undertaking at the Oriental Congress in London, 1874; and even in this most recent edition of the “Book of the Dead”[32] the classification given by him will be preserved. It is precisely this which is wonderful and unique in his works; that they are of lasting stability, and that their substructure remains permanently fixed no matter what alterations may be made in details by more recent acquisitions. There is almost no edifice in the whole domain of Egyptology where the foundation stone does not bear the name of “Lepsius.”

Let us here anticipate by mentioning that throughout his life Lepsius did not cease to busy himself with the “Book of the Dead,” and that even in 1867, in a large and excellent work,[33] he made an effort to trace out the origin of the whole work collectively, and of its principal parts. The sarcophagi of the ancient kingdom and the funereal texts which cover them, constitute the foundation of this important publication, which once more points out the path for research, and upon which many special investigations have already been, and in the future must be, based.

After his sojourn in Egypt, Lepsius was able for the first time to bring to a positive conclusion the studies on Egyptian mythology, which he had begun in Italy. Yet he wrote to Bunsen from Thebes that he had almost despaired of any real progress in the field of mythology, and had only collected the materials in obedience to a blind instinct. “Now,” he continues, “I have found the red thread, which will lead through this apparently endless labyrinth. I have made out the divinities, great and small, and also the most important data for the history of Egyptian mythology. The relation between the Greek accounts and the monuments has become clear to me; in short, I know that an Egyptian mythology really can be written.”

That which he found in Thebes he combined, at a comparatively late date, with what he had gained in Italy, and the results of all these collections, studies, and combinations were finally accumulated in his epoch-producing work on the first Egyptian Pantheon.[34] This proves that even with the motley swarm of Egyptian Gods it is possible to follow the historical principle of classification. Lepsius was the first, not only to discover and more nearly determine the “group of the superior gods,” but also to establish clearly the reasons why the adored beings of whom it consists are associated together. Where variations occurred he explained their origin from local or temporal causes in a convincing manner. His conjectures as to the age of the Osiris myth have been confirmed by the inscriptions in the lately opened pyramids.

In his treatise on the gods of the four elements[35] there is much with which we cannot now agree. Contrary to his opinion their names occur much earlier than the time of the Ptolemies. But in spite of this and other errors the paper stands, as far as method is concerned, on an equal footing with its predecessors, and it is here that he has summed up in a brief phrase the rule which he steadfastly obeyed during his long and active scientific career: “In all antiquarian investigations it will always be safest to begin with a chronological analysis of the material, before proceeding to a systematic arrangement thereof.”

Lepsius also adhered firmly to this rule when he entered upon that department of his science towards which at Rome he was impelled, not only by the influence of the Archaeological Institute to which he belonged, but by the tendency of his whole life. He there turned his attention to the art of the ancient Egyptians, and chiefly to their architecture. In his parents’ house at Naumburg he had seen the preference with which his father cultivated this branch of art; on all his journeys he filled his note-book with observations on the remarkable buildings which he encountered, and accompanied them with little drawings. We know how eagerly, particularly at Göttingen, he had followed the progress of the archaeology of art, which was greatly promoted at that time by the influence of Winckelmann. The air of Rome, too, was as thoroughly permeated with art then as it is now, and with even more enthusiastic artistic interests. There all conversation between aspiring friends so easily took, as it still takes, the form of a conversation on art. So that Lepsius, as well as Bunsen, who a few years later was to publish his celebrated work on Christian basilicas, felt the liveliest interest in these subjects and was forced by an inherent necessity to give special attention to the remarkable art of that people to whose resurrection he had pledged the best powers of his life.

In 1838, then, there appeared Lepsius’ dissertation on the columns of the ancient Egyptians, and their connection with the Grecian columns.[36] When we designate this work also, which lay outside of the master’s special field of research, as original, and unsurpassed of its kind, in so doing we are in no wise “burning incense to our dead” but simply judging it as it deserves to be rated. Here, as elsewhere, Lepsius applies the law quoted above, by dividing chronologically the material which he has first thoroughly collected, and pointing out how the Egyptian columns arose from their original beginnings and developed themselves independently, here in cave-building, and there in open-air edifices;—he scrupulously maintains the division between the two. This classification alone is a real achievement, and any one who follows the progress of cave-building step by step with him, will see the Doric column with all its component parts develop organically before him. Even he who, out of regard for the omnipotence of the genius of Hellenic art, is averse to considering the Doric column as an architectural constituent borrowed by the Greeks from the Egyptians, will not be able to deny that the transformation of the pillar in the so-called proto-Doric column of the Egyptian cave-architecture (first and chiefly in the vaults of Beni Hassan), can be proved to be natural and necessary, while the Greek-Doric column, even in the oldest temples of the Doric order, makes its first appearance as a thing complete, and as fallen from heaven. It indeed forms from the beginning an organic and essential part of the monument of architecture to which it belongs, but while its origin cannot be definitely pointed out on Hellenic ground, it can be easily and positively traced in the Egyptian cave-architecture. Lepsius reverted to this question after his Egyptian journey, and in an academical treatise[37] he criticized sharply yet admiringly the fundamental conditions, the properties, and the merits of that Egyptian art, whose development he here, as elsewhere, followed with peculiar interest. He gave his attention also to the canon of proportions, that is, the binding rule according to which the Egyptian sculptors were obliged to measure and shape the relative proportions of the different parts of the human body. He had already been interested in the study of this subject in Rome, for in October, 1833, he saw a little bust in the Palin collection which was furnished on the under surface and both side surfaces with mathematically exact squares, the sides of which appeared to give him the unit of the canon. “The whole bust,” he tells Bunsen, “is wrought by this unit, which, in fact, according to my measurements of various statues, is contained about twenty-one times in the whole height.”

This canon was well known to the Greeks, and Diodorus refers to it in the last chapter of his first book. According to him the body was to be divided into twenty-one and a quarter parts, and Lepsius now found that this rule conformed to the teachings of the later sculptors of the Ptolemaic era, who undoubtedly divided the human form up to the top of the forehead into twenty-one and one-quarter parts, but up to the crown of the head into twenty-three parts. Previous to this mode of division the canon had been twice altered, and both of these older rules (the more recent refers to the sculptures of the time of the pyramids), had for a fundamental unit the foot, which, taken six times, corresponded to the height of the body when erect, not indeed, as one would have expected, from the sole to the crown of the head, but only to the top of the forehead. The distinction between the first and second canon principally concerns the position of the knee: in the Ptolemaic canon, known to Diodorus, Lepsius found the general distribution itself changed. This he first discovered at Kom Ombos. We have always found the estimates of Lepsius entirely confirmed by our own measurements; yet, as the labors of Charles Blanc in the same department demonstrate, some other unit than the foot might be the basis of the canon of proportions, such as the finger in men, the claw in lions—ex ungue leonem.