At the beginning of the 19th century, several scholars attempted to decipher the hieroglyphs, until J.-F. Champollion finally succeeded in making this script accessible once more. One of his greatest rivals in this endeavour was the Saxon scholar Gustav Seyffarth.

From 1826 to 1829, he travelled Europe, visited various Egyptian collections and documented numerous inscriptions. His time at the Egyptian Museum in Turin coincided not only with that of Champollion, but also with the discovery of the Royal Canon of Turin, which Seyffarth was the first to examine alongside Champollion. Both were to die young, yet unlike Champollion, Seyffarth soon fell almost completely into oblivion. His notes on the Royal Canon of Turin were commented on by Sir A. H. Gardiner (1959) with “the benefit we can now receive from S^I [i.e. Seyffarth’s manuscript] is small: no signs now lost are there visible (...)” and have remained unheeded ever since.

This lecture will shed light on Seyffarth’s life and his notes on the Royal Canon of Turin, and will explore the question of what value his writings hold for research into European collections, and whether they might, after all, hold some surprises.