Lepsius as a linguist: fieldwork, philology, phonetics, and ‘the Hamitic hypothesis’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) is mainly remembered as a founder of Egyptology. However, the largest share of his published work was about linguistics and philology, going from the decipherment and comparison of ancient writing systems to the classification of African languages. This article explores his linguistic work and the tensions within it: between different areas of expertise, between theory and observation, and between the study of languages with high and low philological prestige. In particular it focuses on his fieldwork in the Nile region in 1844, his design for a phonetic Standard Alphabet, and the hypothesis of a ‘Hamitic’ language family that connected Egyptian, Coptic, and Ethiopian with Berber as well as Khoisan languages.