---
title: "In his 1842 memorandum proposing the Egypt expedition to the Prussian king, Karl Richard Lepsius described the paper-impression method itself as 'still almost unknown' (eine noch fast unbekannte... Art)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://aaew.bbaw.de/archive/abklatsch-archiv"
source_author: "Karl Richard Lepsius (quoted within the BBAW's own account of its Lepsius-expedition archive)"
source_title: "Papierabdrücke / Die Abklatsche der Lepsius-Expedition"
source_venue: "BBAW Abklatscharchiv project pages"
source_date: "accessed 2026-08-13 (Denkschrift itself dated 1842)"
source_quote: "Flache Wandskulpturen und namentlich hieroglyphische Inschriften an erreichbaren Orten und von mäßigen Dimensionen sind in Papierabdrücken zu nehmen, eine noch fast unbekannte und für diese Zwecke unschätzbare Art, die treuesten Faksimile auf eine schnelle mechanische Weise zu gewinnen"
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","primary-source"]
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"
---


Proposing the Prussian royal expedition to Egypt in 1842, [[claim-lepsius-founding-practitioner-of-the-squeeze-method|Karl Richard Lepsius]] wrote to the king: "Flache Wandskulpturen und namentlich hieroglyphische Inschriften an erreichbaren Orten und von mäßigen Dimensionen sind in Papierabdrücken zu nehmen, eine noch fast unbekannte und für diese Zwecke unschätzbare Art, die treuesten Faksimile auf eine schnelle mechanische Weise zu gewinnen." (Flat wall sculptures, and especially hieroglyphic inscriptions of moderate size in reachable locations, are to be taken in paper impressions — a still almost unknown method, invaluable for this purpose, of obtaining the most faithful facsimiles in a quick, mechanical way.) The line is preserved and quoted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences directly from Lepsius's expedition memorandum ("Denkschrift").

This is Lepsius's own characterization of the technique's obscurity at the exact moment he proposed deploying it systematically — primary evidence that he saw himself as introducing a little-used method into large-scale, disciplined use, not as inventing it outright. It does not settle *how* little-used the method actually was outside Egyptology — see [[claim-squeeze-technique-predates-lepsius-learned-not-invented]], which independently confirms that the technique had a roughly 150-year prior history in Mediterranean epigraphy that Lepsius himself had studied before the expedition.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> "Eine noch fast unbekannte... Art" is doing careful work — Lepsius doesn't claim to have invented the thing, he claims it's still nearly unknown, which is a narrower and more honest boast, and it happens to be true of *large-scale Egyptological* use even though it was already a century and a half old among Mediterranean epigraphers. He picked his words more precisely than the "founding practitioner" shorthand that outlived him.