Frederick William IV. had honored Bunsen with the title of baron. Apart from this, however, he, like Lepsius, deserves to be designated as a genuine noble German freeman; that is, a man of unalterable intrinsic superiority, who derives the right to carry his head loftily, not from external circumstances, but from honest, indefatigable, difficult, and conscientious work. To such labor they both remained faithful through all the circumstances of life, and when we see the leaders of a turbulent party claiming the name of “workman” exclusively for the man with horny hands, and exerting themselves to restrict within the narrowest limits the hours of employment for the day laborer, we would point to these two men, who free from every material solicitude of life, turned their nights into day, bade defiance to bodily fatigue, and only sought refreshment in change of occupation, in order to fit themselves for the exalted enterprise which they had imposed upon themselves. His first purely Egyptological paper presents the most brilliant evidence of the zeal and sagacity with which Lepsius, from the beginning, devoted himself to the study of the Egyptian writing and language. It appeared in the annals of the Roman Archaeological Institute, in the shape of a letter to his Pisan friend, Rosellini,[25] and ranks among model works of this kind on account of its wonderful succinctness, clearness and comprehensiveness. Lepsius gives in it a complete summary of the whole system of writing of the ancient Egyptians. He distinguishes, with clearness and acuteness, the elements of which this is composed, and from the Master’s list of sound symbols, which was much too large, he singles out those elements which do not properly belong there, and fortunately rejects one of the fundamental errors of Champollion’s system. As we now know, the phonetic part of hieroglyphics, that is the part relating to sounds, consists simply of letters which were sounded,--our _matres lectionis_,--and syllabic signs. These by themselves alone can represent a syllable. Thus, the mere picture of a mirror is to be read ‘_anch_,’ but to this picture may also pertain all the sounds of the syllable which it represents: thus, in our case, an ‘_a_, _n_, and _ch_.’ Champollion, on the contrary, had known nothing of syllabic symbols, and thus regarded the mirror as a mere abbreviation of the word ‘_anch_,’ which he had also met with written out in full. This error was done away with by Lepsius,[26] and through him that immensely important element of writing, the syllabic symbol, received its due. The observations contained in this treatise on the relation of Coptic (See page 76) to ancient Egyptian, are also of fundamental value.