There he might hope to find all that was best and of most importance, for the Egyptian museum at Turin is now, and was at that time, one of the largest and richest in the world, and so far exceeded Lepsius’ expectations that instead of several weeks he allowed himself to be detained there for more than three months. On the twenty-fourth of February he wrote to Bunsen: “I have not thought it necessary to hurry, as Turin is without doubt the most important point of my journey as far as the collection of materials is concerned. One realizes this thrice as strongly when one has staid here awhile and become familiar with the situation. I leave this excellent museum very unwillingly, but one would have to stay for years to exhaust it, and I do not think that I have employed my time ill. You will enjoy the rich harvest which I bring you from here. I have taken paper impressions of all the inscriptions engraved on hard stone; part of them with starch, which makes them indestructible. Unfortunately, I could not continue my Parisian collection of a hundred and twenty stelae in the same way, for they were unnecessarily afraid here of injury to the limestone from the damp paper, so that the most important stelae and many other objects in limestone I have partly counterdrawn with pith paper and partly copied, and have done this to some extent in the colors, the value of which I first learned to appreciate properly here. The greater part of the time, though, I have spent upon the rich stores of papyrus, almost the whole of which, with all the important fragments of every kind, I have counterdrawn or copied. I have taken special pains with the large perfect ritual, which can be found here and nowhere else.” He had not yet seen the stores of papyrus in London and Leyden. “It was a matter of special importance to me to possess some common basis for all the other fragments of the ritual (which are to be found everywhere; a portion of them are at Rome), for the special purpose of beginning an extensive collection of the different readings; very necessary for the study of hieroglyphics. Therefore, I have spared no pains to compare the whole Parisian papyrus, a copy of which I have, with that here. I have noted all the different readings, in the text as well as in the vignettes, and counterdrawn all that is lacking, which amounts to about twice as much as the Parisian copy. So that I now possess the most perfect ritual, in a volume of more than sixty sheets of paper, of half-folio size, stitched together, besides the collation of the Parisian ritual, a preparatory work which will be very valuable for future studies.”