The Ruins of Ancient Egypt and Nubia in Twelve Imperial-Folio Volumes
Richard Lepsius’s deluxe, massive twelve-volume set of imperial folio lithographs materializes the apex of nineteenth-century archaeological “Egyptomania” among the great powers of Europe. In 1842, the Prussian emperor Friedrich Wilhelm IV commissioned Lepsius to travel to the Nile River basin and lead the excavations in one of the first government-led professional archaeological endeavors in German history, helping to lay important foundations for the academic discipline of scientific archaeology within the German academy.
Lepsius spent four years in Egypt and Nubia (1842–46) supervising digs, sketching findings, and learning various regional linguistic dialects. He returned with an enormous trove of documentary materials, including some 1,300 sketches of the Nile Valley landscape, as well as detailed architectural drawings of a vast array of ancient temples, tombs, hieroglyphs, bas-reliefs, murals, and much more. Lepsius’s horde of records also included some 6,000 squeezes of epigraphic inscriptions, plaster casts, and numerous ancient artifacts. So great was this body of material that it would take a decade from the start of the expedition for the full twelve-volume compendium of some 900 plates, as well as interpretive texts and commentaries, to reach print.
As was so often the case, despite the destructive nature of these seminal archaeological efforts, they nonetheless preserved a great deal that would have otherwise been lost, whether through looting, the quarrying of archaeological spolia, or outright destruction. Benign neglect also lead to the reburial of portions of Lepsius’s excavations, perhaps most notably of the so-called Headless Pyramid, which was recorded by the Prussian team only to disappear beneath the sands once more until its rediscovery in a twenty-five-foot-high sand dune in 2008.
This dazzling collection of plates of masterfully executed prints was produced just as early photographic technology was first beginning to emerge in Europe and North America, though it would not know mainstream use in archaeological contexts for many decades to come. More recent innovations in chemical-process chromolithography enabled many of Lepsius’s images to be reproduced in living color, capturing, if not also exaggerating, the grandeur of the vast ruins his team encountered during their journeys. No expense was spared in this collaborative effort that involved the architect Georg Gustav Erbkam, painter Ernst Weidenbach, lithographers Max Weidenbach (Ernst’s brother), H. Reubke, and H. Loelliot, and the printer H. Mercer.
Lepsius’s labors were hardly ars gratia artis. Following the defeat of Napoleon, Prussia had clearly emerged as the primary unifying state power within the confederation of states that had formerly comprised the Holy Roman Empire and would help drive the subsequent North German Confederation in 1867 and assume primacy over the German Empire in 1871. During the 1840s, however, Prussia lagged behind the achievements of Britain and France in their deeply competitive, quasi-imperialistic “competition” for supremacy over the archaeological rewriting of history, as well as in their collecting of ancient monuments and works of art for their great national museums. Up to that point, it was the French who had first successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and amassed great collections of Old and Middle Kingdom artifacts following Napoleon’s epic Nile campaign (1798–1801), immortalized in the eleven-volume folio Description de l’Égypte (1809–29), which Lepsius clearly wished to emulate, but also to surpass.
The first volume of Lepsius’s work opens with maps and idyllic landscapes, architectural blueprints of the major tombs and excavation sites, brightly colored copies of ceiling decorations from the pyramid complexes, mechanical tracings of pillars and tomb structures, and renderings of hieroglyphs found on walls, statues, and facades. The bright colors of several of the prints evoke the sandy haze of the desert, but also retain the vibrancy of the bright pigments and pastel hues they saw decorating the walls and ceilings of many of the ancient tombs. Other seemingly counterintuitive plates preserve in precise detail structures that had fallen into considerable states of ruin, capturing the damages wrought by time right down to uneven cracks in pillars and piles of crumbled stones.
So famous and desirable was Lepsius’s masterpiece that it was included by the trustees of the Peabody Library in its 1863 printed desiderata list of books to be purchased. It would become one of the most expensive purchases ever made by the Peabody Library during its early years, fetching £65—a king’s ransom by mid-nineteenth-century standards.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Elke Freier et al. (eds.), Von Naumburg bis zum Blauen Nil: die Lepsius-Expedition nach Ägypten und Nubien (Naumburg: Stadtmuseum Naumburg, 2012); Christian Loeben, “Karl Richard Lepsius and the Royal Prussian Expedition to Egypt (1842–1845/6),” in Vanessa Davies and Dimitri Laboury (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Egyptian Epigraphy and Paleography (Oxford University Press, 2020), 243–56; Chris Naunton, Egyptologists’ Notebooks: The Golden Age of Nile Exploration in Words, Pictures, Plans, and Letters (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020), esp. 126–31; Chantal Orgogoza and Geneviève Sabron, “The Birth of Egyptology,” in Fernand Beaucour et al. (eds.), The Discovery of Egypt (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 203–58. Lepsius-Projekt Sachsen-Anhalt: http://edoc3.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/lepsius/.
