Budgeted by the Prussian royalty and directed by the Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, the Prussian expedition to the Nile between 1842 and1845 had a considerable impact on the reception and perception of Ancient Egypt in Berlin, Germany, and Europe. This expedition is documented not only by Lepsius’ publications – first and foremost the 12 volumes of plates under the title Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (Berlin 1849-1859), but also by comprehensive inventories of Egyptian objects, scientific materials, and archive records kept by the Berlin Egyptian Museum and the Berlin Academy. The amount, diversity, and polyphony of documentary sources makes this expedition an exemplary case for our knowledge of the organization and accomplishment of big scientific enterprises in the mid-19th century.
Among the materials of the expedition there are more than 1700 drawings – an enormous but hitherto inaccessible treasure of artistic and scientific expressiveness. It is owed to the work of five draftsmen and two architects who accompanied the expedition. Notwithstanding their strife for objectiveness, their drawings bear evidence of individual perceptions of Egypt under the aesthetic and epistemological constraints of the time. In turn, being the source for the monumental publication of plates, these drawings themselves shaped societal perceptions of 19th- and 20th-century Europe about Egypt.
The Einstein project, affiliated to four Berlin institutions – the Egyptian Museum, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Freie Universität and Technische Universität, aimed at the digitization and interdisciplinary exploitation of this treasure of drawings. All items were digitized in high-resolution image data. These data were annotated and scientifically processed under two perspectives: At the one hand, the entire body of drawings was annotated with Egyptological information and object metadata. On the other hand, a chosen selection of more than 100 drawings were art-historically described and annotated with comparative material. They were thus classified according to patterns of imagination of the spatially and culturally distant world of Ancient (and contemporary) Egypt under the epistemological horizon, and in media formats of 19th-century Europe.
Last, but not least, all objects which the expedition had removed from their in-situ contexts (the Egyptian architectural and landscape contexts “virtualized”, as it were, by the drawings) and brought to the Berlin Egyptian Museum were submitted to a detailed and extensive stocktaking. Further ore, an architectural research agenda focusing on the architectural drawings of the expedition’s architect Georg Erbkam and a print edition of his diaries was started during the project period. The project work has laid foundation for the planned compilation, digital integration, interlinking, and freely accessible publication of all objects, materials and archive records relating to the Prussian expedition to Egypt and Nubia under the roof of an online portal whose continuous expansion shall be achieved through future projects. A special exhibition under the title “Adventures on the Nile. Prussia and Egyptology, 1842 – 1845” will be shown from 2 September2022 until 7 March 2023 in the New Museum, marking an end point of the project, and conveying its scientific achievements to the public.