Karl Richard Lepsius occupation archaeologist
Karl Richard Lepsius (Latin: Carolus Richardius Lepsius) (23 December 1810 – 10 July 1884) was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist, linguist and modern archaeologist.He is widely known for his magnum opus Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien.Early life
Karl Richard Lepsius was the son of Karl Peter Lepsius, a classical scholar from Naumburg, and his wife Friederike (née Gläser), who was the daughter of composer Carl Ludwig Traugott Gläser. The family name was originally "Leps" and had been Latinized to "Lepsius" by Karl's paternal great-grandfather Peter Christoph Lepsius. He was born in Naumburg on the Saale, Saxony.He studied Greek and Roman archaeology at the University of Leipzig (1829–1830), the University of Göttingen (1830–1832), and the  Frederick William University of Berlin (1832–1833). After receiving his doctorate following his dissertation De tabulis Eugubinis in 1833, he travelled to Paris, where he attended lectures by the French classicist Jean Letronne, an early disciple of Jean-François Champollion and his work on the decipherment of the Egyptian language, visited Egyptian collections all over Europe and studied lithography and engraving.Later career
Upon his return to Europe in 1845, he married Elisabeth Klein in 1846 and was appointed as a professor of Egyptology at Berlin University in the same year, and the co-director of the Ägyptisches Museum in 1855; after the death of Giuseppe Passalacqua in 1865, he was director of the museum.  In 1866 Lepsius returned to Egypt, where he discovered the Decree of Canopus at Tanis, an inscription closely related to the Rosetta Stone, which was likewise written in Egyptian (hieroglyphic and demotic) and Greek.
Lepsius was president of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome from 1867 to 1880, and from 1873 until his death in 1884, the head of the Royal Library at Berlin. He was the editor of the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde, a fundamental scientific journal for the new field of Egyptology, which remains in print to this day. While at the editorial helm, Lepsius commissioned typographer Ferdinand Theinhardt (on behalf of the Prussian Academy of Sciences) to cut the first hieroglyphic typeface, the so-called Theinhardt font, which is in use today.
Lepsius published widely in the field of Egyptology, and is considered the father of this modern scientific discipline, assuming a role that Champollion might have achieved, had he not died so young. Much of his work is fundamental to the field. Indeed, Lepsius even coined the phrase Totenbuch ("Book of the Dead"). He was also a pioneer in the field of African linguistics, though his ideas are now mainly considered to be outdated. Based on his work in the ancient Egyptian language, and his field work in the Sudan, Lepsius  developed a Standard Alphabet for transliterating African Languages; it was published 1855 and revised in 1863. His 1880 Nubische Grammatik mit einer Einleitung über die Völker und Sprachen Afrika's contains a sketch of African peoples and a classification of African languages, as well as a grammar of the Nubian languages.
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