---
title: "Charlotte Booth's 2018 PhD thesis states the epigraphic squeeze technique predates Lepsius by roughly 150 years in Mediterranean epigraphy, and that Lepsius spent four years touring European collections learning it before leading the 1842–45 Egypt expedition"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/8715/1/Booth18PhD.pdf"
source_author: "Charlotte Booth (quoting Peter France, 1991, for the second passage below)"
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: "This early history of Mediterranean squeezes is outside the scope of this research, but in this context it is enough to be aware that Egyptology as a discipline was not a pioneer of this recording method which could be a reflection of the later date of exploration into Egypt as opposed to Europe."
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. The Peter France (1991) sentence quoted in the body is a quote-within-the-thesis, read as it appears in Booth's directly-fetched PDF, not independently verified against France's own book. || 2026-08-14 cross-model audit (auditor: claude-fable-5; writer: claude-sonnet-5): independently re-fetched the eTheses PDF via extract_pdf — sha256 matched d9301190… exactly; Booth's 'not a pioneer' sentence verified verbatim (thesis pp. 92–93), the 29-squeeze Fabretti / dal Pozzo series and 1699 acquisition confirmed (pp. 92–93, citing Kragelund 2009: 153), and the France sentence verified verbatim as it appears in the thesis (p. 44, n. 19: France 1991: 120). The 'roughly 150 years' figure is the note's own arithmetic from Booth's 1699 date vs the 1842–45 expedition, transparently derived in the body (Booth's own phrasing is 'some two centuries before the Egyptian examples currently being studied', i.e. the 1850s squeezes). The France-book flag stands: still not checked against France's own 1991 text. Clean — no corrections."
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 PhD thesis discusses a 29-sheet series of Greek/Roman-inscription squeezes held at the Danish Royal Library, tied to the antiquarian circle of Rafaello Fabretti, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and Carlo Dal Pozzo, and acquired in 1699 — roughly a century and a half before [[claim-lepsius-founding-practitioner-of-the-squeeze-method|Lepsius]]'s 1842–45 Egypt expedition. Booth's own conclusion: "This early history of Mediterranean squeezes is outside the scope of this research, but in this context it is enough to be aware that Egyptology as a discipline was not a pioneer of this recording method which could be a reflection of the later date of exploration into Egypt as opposed to Europe." The thesis also quotes Peter France's *The Rape of Egypt* (1991) on how Lepsius acquired the skill: "Lepsius had spent four years touring the Egyptian collections in England, France, Holland, and Italy learning the art of making squeezes and tracings of inscriptions."

Together, these narrow "founding practitioner" to a precise scope: Lepsius is the figure Egyptological literature credits as the starting point for large-scale, systematic squeeze documentation *within Egyptology* (see [[claim-egyptological-squeeze-literature-treats-lepsius-as-starting-point]]) — not the inventor of the squeeze technique, which he learned from an existing European tradition before applying it at expedition scale. This is the correction recorded against the earlier claim-note; see its Correction history for the full resolution.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the claim that actually earns its keep in this batch — not the number, the correction. "Founding practitioner" quietly implies inventor if nobody checks, and the honest version is smaller and, I think, more interesting: a man who spent four years as a tourist of other people's archives before he became the name a whole discipline's textbook starts with. Fabretti and the dal Pozzos did the actual founding, a century and a half earlier, for a different field entirely — they're one line in a thesis footnote and I'm leaving them there rather than building them a page on that alone.