On October 15, a Saturday, the six travelers from Germany and their two English companions crossed the Nile above Cairo and rode along the west bank to Gizeh.

There they climb the Cheops pyramid, because there is a special occasion to celebrate.

Today is the birthday of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm, and to celebrate it, the tour group brought not only a picnic basket and a flag, which will be unveiled on the summit plateau to cheers, but also a commemorative plaque in hieroglyphic writing.

"Thus speak the servants of the king, whose name is the sun and rock of Prussia, Lepsius the scribe, Erbkam the architect, the Weidenbach brothers the painters, Frey the painter, Franke the shaper, Bonomi the sculptor, Wild the architect: Hail the eagle, Shields of the Cross.

.

."

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

The year is 1842. At the beginning of September, the participants of the expedition landed in Alexandria, three weeks later they reached the Egyptian capital with boxes full of books, maps, drawing utensils, measuring instruments, glasses and a daguerreotype (which ultimately remains unused).

Climbing the pyramids is the symbolic highlight of your stay.

The Swiss painter Jakob Frey captured the scene: above, the Europeans in tails and waistcoats, below their local companions in light linen clothes.

The hats are waved, the plaque is embedded in a beam at the entrance to the pyramid.

Then the research work begins.

It lasts three years.

The exhibition that the Egypt Collection of the State Museums set up in the New Museum on the Museum Island to mark the 180th anniversary of the Prussian expedition to the Nile was faced with the task of telling the story of the company without becoming a showcase version of "Terra X". to become.

Because the expedition was not a robber's gun, but the beginning of Egyptology as a science in Germany.

The travelers brought back to Berlin more than thirteen hundred drawings, almost seven and a half thousand paper copies and dozens of plaster casts of Egyptian reliefs, wall paintings and temple architecture. In addition, nineteen hundred original pieces, which were presented to Friedrich Wilhelm IV by the governor Mehmed Ali Pascha, increased the inventory of objects in the royal collections.

The “Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia”, published in twelve volumes by 1859 and documenting the results of the expedition in words and pictures, became the international standard work;

many of their illustrations and explanations reflect the current state of research.

On the other hand, the tour of the Prussian experts from the Mediterranean to the Nubian principalities on the Blue Nile was full of adventurous occurrences, some of them more, most of them less pleasant.

Sandstorms raged, Bedouins raided the camp, disease raged among the travelers.

The story of the child slaves that Karl Richard Lepsius, the leader of the expedition, received as a gift from a Sudanese princess would provide enough material for a postcolonial novel of the latest type.

Lepsius, refusing to treat the boy as personal property, put money aside for him on the journey.

In Berlin he had Gaber Mariam, who was born a Christian, trained as a missionary.

Something apparently went wrong, because the young Sudanese was sent back to his homeland without an official order.