A Brill Calendar: July 10

Few great civilizations were hidden from view so long as Pharaonic Egypt.

With hardly an exception, scholarly disciplines display some continuity. Seen as an ongoing discussion, each individual is joining it contingently, while the discourse usually hardly notices his taking leave of absence from it for whatever reason. With this notion in mind, Egyptology is a singular phenomenon: at the beginning of the 19th century the past of North-Eastern Africa still resembles a boundless sea with navigators adrift on it lacking coordinates, landmarks and recollection.

This changed fundamentally in 1849 upon the publication in Berlin of a book by Karl Richard Lepsius (Naumburg an der Saale, Saxony, December 23 1810 – Berlin July 10 1884) entitled ‘Chronologie der Ägypter’. An expedition (1843 – 1845) to Egypt and the Sudan under Royal Prussian patronage had earlier widened the intellectual horizon of Lepsius – trained as an archaeological philologist with a taste for comparative linguistic study – in one fell swoop.

The roll-call of structures, monuments and artefacts Lepsius unearthed, together with techniques invented for the purpose make him a founder of scientific physical archaeology, but his finest claim to enduring fame must be that his ingenuity restored to Pharaonic civilization its time-table; an essential homage to any ancient culture; comparable to the service the great Scaliger (Agen, France August 5 1540 – Leyden January 21 1609) rendered to Europe in his chef d’oeuvre, the ‘Opus de emendatione tempore’ (1583).