Message #81

[Bianca]

THE DISCOVERY OF AKHENATON                                                             continued



In 1842, however, fresh light was admitted to dispel some of the obscurities when
the Prussian Epigraphic Expedition under Richard Lepsius, a disciple of Champollion and the foremost Egyptologist of his day, arrived in Egypt to begin their immense survey.  The team paid two visits to Amarna in 1843 and 1845, where in the course of a total of twelve phenomenally busy days, they copied scenes and inscriptions and took paper squeezes of reliefs in the northern tombs and of those in the southern group, which had been opened by Hay a dozen years earler.  These re-
cords, still happily housed in Berlin, are invaluable, since not infrequently they are now the only evidence we have of what existed on walls that have since been damaged or totally destroyed. 

Lepsius' explorations were mostly concerned with a more accurate and complete knowledge of monuments already brought to light, rather than with an increase in the sum-total of new excavations and discoveries.  But his main contribution to the
advance of the subject was the worthy publication of results in the twelve mighty volumes of the "Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopen", which were devoted
solely to illustrations and the five volumes of letter press, which appeared posthumously. 

It was this work that enabled scholars in subsequent years, with their increasing
knowledge of ancient Egyptian archaeology and philology, to improve their understanding and elucidation of the Amarna monuments and to begin a serious attempt to write the history of the site.