Uranios
Egyptology: Lepsius at the Second International Congress of Orientalists (1874)
Harco Willems
https://journals.openedition.org/bifao/14767
Lepsius ridiculed
The atmosphere between Lepsius and de Rougé did not improve. In late 1855, a parchment inscribed with a Greek text was offered to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin by the antiquities dealer Constantine Simonides. In the document, a certain Uranios presents an encompassing and unique account of Egyptian history. The manuscript was rather expensive, and when the Berlin Academy of Sciences could not rapidly furnish the sum required, Lepsius provided half the amount from his own pocket. However, the Uranios text was a fake, and when this became known it led to great public exhilaration. According to the diary of Elisabeth, Lepsius’s wife, a comedy play about the scandal was even staged in the
Königsstädtisches Theater in Berlin, in which one of the protagonists was called Lipsius. International scholarship wrote scathingly about Lepsius. This was for instance the case in France. Lepsius’s protests, adressed in 1856 to Emmanuel de Rougé, met with a cold shoulder: the irritations about the way Brugsch had been treated, clearly had not yet subsided.
83
83 Mehlitz 2011, pp. 262–265. The comedy was written by Ernst Dohm and entitled “Simonides oder die Wissenschaft muß umkehren.” Since the
Königsstädtisches Theater had been closed in 1851, Elisabeth’s remark that the play was enacted there must be incorrect (Freydank n.d.,
https://berlingeschichte.de/bms/bmstext/9810prob.htm ). Most likely, therefore, it was staged in the
Königsstädtisches Vaudeville Theater, which had opened in the Blumenstraße in Berlin in 1855 (
http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/Rudolf Cerf/de-de/, accessed 13 July 2021). After having been found out, Simonides had to pay back his money, and tried his luck elsewhere. He i.a. sold forged Greek papyri to the British art collector Mayer (see
Peet 1920, p. 1; Bierbrier 2012, pp. 512–513). For this episode, see now also
Gertzen 2022, pp. 40–41.
Mehlitz 2011
H. Mehlitz,
Richard Lepsius: Ägypten und die Ordnung der Wissenschaft, Berlin, 2011.
Peet 1920
T.E. Peet,
The Mayer Papyri A & B. Nos M. 11162 and M. 11186 of the Free Public Museums, Liverpool, London, 1920.
Bierbrier 2012
M.L. Bierbrier,
Who Was Who in Egyptology, London, 2012 (4th ed.).
Gertzen 2022
T.L. Gertzen, “Eine allzu lange 2. Zwischenzeit. Die ersten Bemühungen zur Erstellung einer ägyptischen Chronologie, der falsche Uranios und Richard Lepsius als Historiker”,
ZÄS 149, 2022, pp. 36–43.
