By the beginning of the year 1850 the arrangement of the Egyptian relics in the new museum was completed, and after Passalacqua’s death, when Lepsius had officially assumed the management of the collection, he caused Ernest Weidenbach to be employed as assistant in the Egyptian department. He also immediately drew up a full description of the pictures on the walls,[72] for the use of visitors to the museum, and afterwards prepared a little catalogue.[73] In 1878, he had the larger monuments furnished with short explanatory labels. After his appointment as chief librarian he nominated Dr. L. Stern as first assistant superintendent. Dr. Stern aided him in all his labors concerning the museum with diligence, judgment and technical knowledge; he was an able Egyptologist and had a thorough knowledge of the Coptic language. The Egyptian collection received continual additions under the direction of Lepsius, and the complaisance with which he placed its treasures at the service of foreign scholars was universally recognized.
As an academical instructor Lepsius also manifested the high intellectual qualities and admirable ability peculiar to himself. His first lecture was delivered on the twenty-ninth of October, 1846, and related to the condition of Egyptological science in France and Italy, compared with what had been accomplished on the same field in Germany. It went off excellently, and amongst his hundred auditors appeared officials of high rank and military men. As his lectures proceeded he took advantage on their account of the collection intrusted to his care, and we remember with pleasure the weekly lectures which he read amongst the monuments in the halls of the museum. The special discourses delivered in the directors room were usually succeeded by rambles through the museum, as instructive as they were interesting.
The public lectures in the museum attracted students from all the faculties, but the private lectures, which he delivered at his own house to a few youthful scholars who desired to devote themselves to the study of Egyptology, were models as regarded the well-considered arrangement of the material. Amongst them we must praise as especially instructive the historical and chronological lectures. These were attended with profit by many young students of history. The purely grammatical lectures were confined to the ancient Egyptian grammar, and only incidentally touched upon the hieratic or the later linguistic forms of speech of the demotic and Coptic. His delivery was always simple, and nevertheless the surpassing faculty of judgment and the severe critical method of the teacher always enchained the attention of his hearers. The material was always as copious as the arrangement was excellent.
Lepsius gave to the writer of this biography the strongest proof of the seriousness with which he regarded his office of instructor and the lovely benevolence which was united with his other great qualities. When a young and enthusiastic student I was obliged by illness to keep the house during a whole winter term, and I shall be forever grateful to Lepsius for the great and rare kindness with which he visited me on a certain day of every week, and went over the essential parts of the lectures of which my illness had deprived me. These private lectures, or rather these lessons when the pupil worked under the direction of the master, for which of course no material equivalent could be given, are among my most delightful memories, and a more liberal gift I have never received. Those of his scholars who afterwards rendered special service to Egyptology were J. Dümichen, professor at Strasburg, and E. Naville, the eminent Genoese Egyptologist. A. Erment, professor at Berlin, and A. Wiedemann, private lecturer at Bonn, attended his lectures during subsequent terms. The younger Egyptologists educated by me at Leipsic, he liked to call his “grandpupils.”
At that time, and indeed in 1856, there was submitted to the Berlin Academy and offered to it for sale, by professor Dindorf of Leipsic, a palimpsest containing the work of Uranius mentioned by Stephen of Byzantium, Αἰγυπτίων βασιλέων ἀναγραφῶν βίβλοι τρεῖς, (three books of lists of the Egyptian kings). Up to that time this had been supposed lost. On the first examination, at which Lepsius was present, there appeared to be no reason to doubt the genuineness of the manuscript. It was written between the lines of a genuine text of the twelfth century. The traits of the Greek uncial writing, skilfully reproduced in the style of the first centuries after Christ, would not be suspected by a palaeographer of the present day, although it is now proved that the codex is a counterfeit. When it was learned that the manuscript belonged to the Greek Simonides of ill-repute, some doubts were raised, and yet the rediscovery of the Uranius would have been of such eminent importance for the historical and chronological studies in which Lepsius was then engaged, that he furnished from his own pocket half the price, as a deposit in order to secure it for Berlin and for himself. Dindorf had declared that in consequence of an agreement with Simonides he could not leave the manuscript behind in Berlin for closer inspection without such a deposit. This examination was committed to Lepsius, and on searching more thoroughly the lists of kings which Simonides represented to be those of Uranius, he soon found there could be no question but that he had before him a bold and unprecedently skilful counterfeit. Indisputable arguments were soon added to the internal reasons which had led Lepsius to this conviction, and it then became a question of recovering from the counterfeiter his plunder of twenty-five thousand thalers. In this Lepsius was successful, owing to the cleverness and prudence of Stieber, the chief of police, who accompanied him to Leipsic. Thus the Berlin library was protected from loss and imposition, and science from unspeakable confusion, through the sagacity of our friend. Lepsius himself furnished information as to the particulars of this affair in a clear and exhaustive explanation.[74] Simonides appears to have continued to drive his trade as a counterfeiter, for it is hardly possible that it was any one else than he who produced the manuscript of the Persians of Aeschylus, which reached Leipsic by way of Egypt, and (not without our own humble coöperation) was recognized by Ritschl as a forgery.[75]
During his life in Berlin as a Master Workman, Lepsius also addressed himself to those metrological studies which he continued to pursue up to the time of his death. If we look over the Transactions of the Berlin Academy of Sciences we shall also find that he was faithful to research in the department of languages. This was entirely apart from his special and unceasing labors on the Nubian Grammar and in the examination of the fundamental laws of construction of the other African languages.
During his sojourn in Egypt amongst the monuments of the Pharaonic period, his attention had been specially called to the measures of the ancient Egyptians. He had subjected many of the monuments to measurement, and also found certain stamps of linear measure, with accompanying figures, upon some of those of the Old Kingdom. These he studied according to the same method which had already approved itself to him throughout his previous labors. He collected all existing material from the monuments with a thoroughness and in an abundance thitherto unknown, and subjected all previous investigations and measurements to severe criticism. From the information thus gained he sagaciously and cautiously deduced positive inferences. In his investigations he also included the kindred measures of other ancient peoples.
In his fine work on the ancient Egyptian ell and its subdivisions[76] he arrived at the conclusion that the small ell of 0.450 of a meter “was the true unit under-lying the whole system.” The great royal ell, which was in use at the same time, he considered a special ell, distinct from the common one and added to the measures at a very early date. The cause of the increase of the small ell used in private life appeared to him to have been “that the kings or priests paid the same compensation for the great ell, in building, as formerly for the small ell, as the overplus of labor was considered as compulsory service, and not paid for.” In addition to all the greater and lesser units of the Egyptian linear measure[77] he also directed his attention to other measures of the ancient Egyptians,[78] and after familiarizing himself with the results obtained in Assyriology, (which at that time was making rapid progress), he occupied himself with comprehensive researches into the linear measures of the ancient nations in general. He took special pains to subject the celebrated tablet of Senkereh,[79] in which he discerned one of the most important bases of Asiatic metrology, to a searching examination, and in doing so he received the assistance of the most eminent Assyriologists. He restored the whole tablet, and recognized it as a table of comparison, by the aid of which Babylonian-Assyrian measures could be reduced to ells, which were reckoned according to the sexagesimal system. He proved that the metrical systems of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians were entirely distinct from each other, although he could grant them one point in common, the building ell of 0.525 of a meter, which was regularly in use in Egypt in the fourth century before Christ, and was employed in the building of the pyramids.
Although Lepsius had worked with sagacity and caution in the realm of metrology, yet his conclusions in that field were not to remain unchallenged, and he found himself forced to defend the results of his investigations, first against the distinguished Assyriologist Jules Oppert, and then against the attacks of the architect Dörpfeld. This young scholar, who had distinguished himself by his very excellent work in his own special province, attempted to tax Lepsius with a fundamental error, and to prove that the small ell which the latter considered, and was obliged to consider, as a special unit of measure, was in fact nothing of the sort, but should only be regarded as a subdivision of the great royal ell. But the grey-haired scholar, although he had been struck by apoplexy, still rejoiced in a keenness of mind which many a younger man might have envied, and defended himself bravely. He not only opposed his adversary in a controversial treatise scarcely a year before his death, but he also energetically refuted Dörpfeld’s reply in the last of his works, “The Linear Measures of the Ancients.”[80] This appeared a few days before his decease. We have examined both opinions impartially, and cannot but range ourselves on the side of the Master, Lepsius, who had the advantage of his opponent in a knowledge of all the monuments and an understanding of hieroglyphic writing. It was in his favor in the controversy that his adversary partly relied upon perverted translations and on dubious authorities, or those which he was obliged to take at second hand. The old warrior knew how to bring such errors skilfully into the foreground, and thus, at the very beginning, compromise his adversary, who in other respects had worked with good faith in the correctness of his cause. The controversial paper of Lepsius has not the least appearance of being written by an old man suffering from illness. He may have drawn the force of his reply from the conviction that he was in the right. Besides, the vigorous grey-beard saw all that he had won by painful and conscientious labor unexpectedly endangered, and “therefore,” thus he says himself in his last book—“I both desired and was obliged to make a plain answer in a matter which but few understand. Otherwise the greatest confusion might be occasioned in the minds of half-instructed readers by the influence of such an extensive, bold, and yet entirely unfounded attack from a man otherwise estimable, and who, in his own department, has decided merit.”
Lepsius’ last work, on the linear measures of the ancients, included all the results of his metrological studies. In it he took a high standpoint from which it was possible to survey all the multitude of details as one great whole. He considered the linear measures of the Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Assyrians and Persians, and the Philetarian system. This latter he found to be employed in Egypt, especially in the temple of Denderah. But he was not contented with treating them monographically, but also investigated the relations of all these systems to each other, and showed that in all probability a historical connection existed between them.