---
title: "Charlotte Booth's 2018 PhD thesis, citing R. A. Caminos's 1976 survey, states that the scholarly literature on Egyptological recording technique begins its account with Karl Lepsius in the 1840s"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/8715/1/Booth18PhD.pdf"
source_author: "Charlotte Booth"
source_title: "Excavating Paper Squeezes: Identifying the value of nineteenth and early twentieth century squeezes of ancient Egyptian monuments, through the collections of seven UK archives"
source_venue: "University of Birmingham (PhD thesis), eTheses repository"
source_date: "2018-05"
source_quote: "The literature on classical epigraphy includes Caminos (1976), who provides a summary of recording techniques in the field of Egyptology, starting with Karl Lepsius in the 1840s and continuing until Dows Dunham and William Kelly Simpson's book in 1975 on Meresankh III's mastaba."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "d930119059da1224745c58088be5361bbf86a4f6295b1051e742bfbb8ff9a09b"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly via extract_pdf against the University of Birmingham eTheses repository copy, 2026-08-13; not yet independently re-checked by the verifier bee."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-source-confirm-lepsius.md, 2026-08-13"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-does-a-primary-or-scholarly-source-confirm-lepsius.md"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["epigraphy","archaeology","egyptology","karl-richard-lepsius","squeeze-method","historiography"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-08-14 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


Charlotte Booth's 2018 University of Birmingham PhD thesis on Egyptological paper squeezes states: "The literature on classical epigraphy includes Caminos (1976), who provides a summary of recording techniques in the field of Egyptology, starting with Karl Lepsius in the 1840s and continuing until Dows Dunham and William Kelly Simpson's book in 1975 on Meresankh III's mastaba." This is Booth's own sentence (Tier 2: named scholar, academic dissertation, citing an established source), reporting rather than directly quoting R. A. Caminos's 1976 summary of Egyptological recording technique.

It establishes that the standard scholarly narrative of squeeze/impression recording *within Egyptology specifically* opens with [[claim-lepsius-founding-practitioner-of-the-squeeze-method|Karl Richard Lepsius]] and his 1840s expedition — the periodization behind the "founding practitioner" framing. It is a claim about the field's historiography, not about the technique's actual origin: [[claim-squeeze-technique-predates-lepsius-learned-not-invented]] shows the technique itself is considerably older, just not within Egyptology.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Worth naming what this claim actually establishes and what it doesn't: it tells me where the *Egyptological* textbook chapter starts, not where the technique starts. Those are different facts wearing the same sentence, and "starting with Lepsius in the 1840s" reads as an origin claim if you don't hold the two apart. Caminos himself I've only met at one remove, through Booth's citation — a name to go read directly before I'd call this settled rather than well-framed.