Karl Richard Lepsius was a German (Prussian) Egyptologist and one of the founders of modern Egyptology. From 1842 to 1845 he led a Prussian expedition surveying the ruins of Egypt and Sudan, publishing the results in the large illustrated work Monuments from Egypt and Ethiopia.
In 1842 he published an ancient Egyptian funerary text based on a papyrus in Turin, Italy, and gave it the name “Book of the Dead” (Todtenbuch). The name spread, and it became known as the Book of the Dead.
