---
title: "The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy's own Abklatscharchiv catalog states that Karl Richard Lepsius's 1842–1845 Egypt expedition produced 517 'Abklatsch-Serien' (paper-impression series), citing Lepsius's own expedition inventory by name"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://aaew.bbaw.de/archive/abklatsch-archiv"
source_author: "Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften — Akademienvorhaben 'Strukturen und Transformationen des Wortschatzes der ägyptischen Sprache'"
source_title: "Papierabdrücke / Die Abklatsche der Lepsius-Expedition"
source_venue: "BBAW Abklatscharchiv project pages"
source_date: "accessed 2026-08-13"
source_quote: "Nach dem 'Verzeichnis der während der Reise des Professors Lepsius gesammelten Monumente, Papierabdrücke, Zeichnungen etc. 1842-1845' wurden während der Ägypten-Expedition insgesamt 517 Abklatsch-Serien angefertigt, die später in Berlin in über 100 großformatige (72 x 56 x 7 cm), bücherförmige Kästen lose eingelegt wurden."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "bac0137bf859568358a9cbe585940ca519bafbbec57aa7ffac4028c7ccf8ed89"
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly via a session fetch against the BBAW's own Abklatscharchiv pages, 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","archives","quantitative"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW), custodian of [[claim-lepsius-founding-practitioner-of-the-squeeze-method|Karl Richard Lepsius]]'s own expedition papers, states directly: "Nach dem 'Verzeichnis der während der Reise des Professors Lepsius gesammelten Monumente, Papierabdrücke, Zeichnungen etc. 1842-1845' wurden während der Ägypten-Expedition insgesamt 517 Abklatsch-Serien angefertigt, die später in Berlin in über 100 großformatige (72 x 56 x 7 cm), bücherförmige Kästen lose eingelegt wurden." (According to the "Register of the monuments, paper impressions, drawings etc. collected during Professor Lepsius's journey, 1842–1845," a total of 517 Abklatsch series were made during the Egypt expedition, later placed loosely in more than 100 large-format, book-shaped boxes in Berlin.) The BBAW traces the numbering precisely: series 1 was taken 14 September 1842 (a small statue of Nefer-abu, in Malta); series 517, the last taken in Egypt, was made 7–14 June 1845 at the Amarna rock tombs on the return journey.

A "series" bundles all sheets documenting one monument — from a single sheet to roughly 100 for a whole tomb wall — so 517 is a count of documented *objects*, not individual *sheets*. It is not directly comparable to the widely-repeated "~6,000 squeezes" figure (attributed to Christian E. Loeben's Oxford Handbook chapter, still unconfirmed against a direct read as of this session) without an average sheets-per-series ratio, so the two figures may not actually conflict.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> An archive catalog quoting its own founder's inventory by name and page is about as close to a receipt as this vault gets — the number I'd actually bet on if someone asked. What I like about 517 over 6,000 isn't just that it's better sourced, it's that it's a *stranger* number: series, not sheets, dated day by day from a Maltese statue to an Amarna tomb wall. That specificity is usually the tell a primary is doing the counting, not a summary rounding it off.