Richard Lepsius, a biography

by Georg Ebers

Since 1850 he had been a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and since 1858 a corresponding member of the Institut de France. He had besides been elected member of almost half a hundred learned societies. After the death of Trendelenburg, when the office of secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences was vacant, he was asked if he would be inclined to assume it, and only after his decided refusal, and at his suggestion, was E. Curtius chosen. In 1872 he received the most honorable of all German decorations, the order pour le mérite for science and the arts. He had already, in 1869, been appointed a knight of the Bavarian order of Maximilian, which was closely related to the foregoing. In 1883 he was appointed Government Upper Privy Councellor. The unusual and numerous ovations which he received during the same year upon the occasion of his Doctor’s Jubilee of fifty years, were such as have fallen to the lot of but few scholars.

His later works on Egyptian art and the oldest texts of the “Book of the Dead” have been already mentioned. Connected with these were a series of valuable monographs[88] published in the Transactions and Monthly Reports of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and in the “Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Alterthumskunde.” In his seventieth year, after an apoplectic attack which slightly crippled his arm, he presented his long-expected Nubian Grammar[89] to science.

This work, which marked an epoch, comprised the results of many years of study. Throughout his whole life as a master workman he had been engaged in arranging the philological material which he had acquired while in Ethiopia and on the Blue Nile. He had illuminated this mass of knowledge by profound study, and so greatly added to it that, as far as the works then in existence permitted, he had gained a mastery over all branches of language upon the African continent.

The introduction to this book, consisting of a hundred and twenty-six pages, is in itself a colossal achievement. We devoted a special treatise[90] to it soon after its appearance. By means of it the reader is as it were raised upon a hovering cloud, whence he can survey all Africa, and pass in review a portion of the early history of its peoples. He is able, under the guidance of the most skillful of commentators, to obtain thence a general view of all the African nations and their languages. These are presented to him classified into zones and groups, and in fact, in all those stages of their historical existence which are accessible to investigation. This is particularly the case with regard to those peoples with whom the book is especially concerned. The author had recognized in the Nubians a branch of the original African population, who never possessed a historical literature in their own language, and it was no slight matter, from the records of the Egyptians and the occasional reports of the Greeks, Romans and Arabians, to construct the general outlines of a history which begins at such an early period as the building of the pyramids, and ends with the destruction of the great Christian Nubian kingdom at the end of the thirteenth century after Christ.

Lepsius was also induced to construct a history of the Kushite peoples from the records on the monuments of the struggles which the more feeble Nubians had to sustain against that race. At an early date the Kushites were in possession of both shores of the Red Sea, and had also made themselves masters of the eastern bend of the Nile adjacent thereto. Lepsius was also inspired by the desire to approach more nearly to a solution of the problem whether the so-called Ethiopian stone inscriptions, which were yet undeciphered and many of which are to be found between Philae and the confluence of the two sources of the Nile, were written in the African tongue of the Nubians, or in the Kushite language. Of this latter the present Begá language, which is comparatively little known must be considered the successor. This portion of his work is one of the author’s boldest intellectual feats. The chapters which he devotes to the Kushite Puna, as the predecessors of the Phoenician colonists on the Mediterranean, and to their emigration to Babylon, have roused much opposition, and have encountered serious doubt even in ourselves. But other portions of this same historical statement are of great value, and must give repeated impulse to fresh investigation.

The final result of all these researches is that the key to the “Ethiopian” inscriptions so frequently mentioned is to be sought, not in the Nubian but in the Begá language, and the future, we think, will prove the correctness of this supposition. Had Lepsius, during his long journey, been in a position to arrive at those conclusions whence he afterwards inferred the high historic and linguistic importance of the Begá language, he would have given it the first place in his philological researches. He would have devoted to it the thorough study which, as a matter of fact, he gave to the Nubian tongue. The fundamental and comprehensive manner in which he prosecuted this latter study is proved by the second part of the work mentioned above, which comprises the Nubian grammar and its rules of pronunciation, etymology and syntax, as well as reading exercises. These include the whole Gospel of St. Mark, the “Our Father,” and a series of Nubian songs, besides the lexicon and scheme of the Nubian dialects. Good old Achmet Abu Nabbut, a native of Derr, who was perfect master of two Nubian dialects, (the Kennez and Mahas), and first introduced Lepsius to the Nubian tongue, has been for months in my own service, and assures me that Lepsius was the only European who knew how to write the language of his native land. After Lepsius returned to Germany the Nubian ‘Ali wed Schaltuf, whom Count W. von Schlieffen had brought from Africa with him, also did him good service. The Nubian Grammar is certainly a useful work in itself, but the magnificent introduction which precedes it is of yet greater weight and higher significance. It may be described as the beautiful and enduring result of many years of faithful industry and difficult preparatory labor,[91] upon a wide domain of research which had been almost untrodden before.

Max Müller, a faithful friend of the departed, and of his family, has made the following appropriate remarks on this introduction: “While most comparative philologists are at present absorbed in details regarding the character of the possible dialectal diversities of individual vowels and consonants, Professor Lepsius draws with bold strokes the mighty outlines of a history of language which covers four or five thousand years, and embraces the whole continent of Africa and the neighboring coasts of Asia. As the admirers of Gerard Douw shake their heads before the immense surfaces which Paul Veronese has covered with color, so we can readily understand that scholars who are absorbed in the question whether the Arian language had originally four or five distinct “A’s,” turn with a sort of terror from investigations like those of Lepsius, where languages are traced back to a common origin. Happily there is room for both in science, for the Gerard Douws and the Veroneses; indeed it is to be sincerely desired in the interests of science that the two styles may ever exist side by side. There is still much rough work to be done among the hitherto unstudied languages of the world, and for this work the bold, far-seeing eye of the huntsman is far more necessary than the concentrated labor of the philological microscopist.”

For the rest, the Grammar contains much which shows with how fine an ear and sense of detail its author was endowed. He has also proved himself to be a microscopist in his chronological and metrological investigations. To these, as we know, he remained faithful to the end. The effects of his apoplectic attack could not break down his vigorous nature, and his last papers in the “Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache and Alterthumskunde,” his controversial treatise against Herr Dörpfeld, his “Linear Measures of the Ancients,” best prove that the vigor and acuteness of his mind were entirely untouched by this ominous misfortune, and by the heavy blows of destiny which he encountered during the last years of his life.

Lepsius’ career as a Master Workman ended with his life. He was a diligent and faithful laborer up to the boundaries of this earthly existence. He, the Senior Master of a most ambitious branch of study, has laid down his office of pioneer and leader. Egyptology, to which he consecrated the best part of his great powers, will deserve the name of a science so long as she follows the way which the departed pointed out to her. In him the Berlin university lost one of its ornaments, and the Fatherland an investigator who, far beyond its borders, was accounted one of the most eminent of his time.