The principal purpose of the expedition, the one which Lepsius ever kept in view, and which decided the choice of the monuments to be copied, was historical. When he could believe that he had achieved everything possible in pursuance of this object, he felt that he might consider himself satisfied. If we remember this we can easily understand how he was almost wearied by the examination of those temples belonging to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods which he inspected cursorily before coming to Thebes; these were Philae, Kom Ombos, Edfu, Esneh, Erment. We can see especially that the inexhaustible but more lately built temple of Edfu could detain him but for a disproportionately short time. But in Thebes, which he reached more than two years after leaving Europe, he found once more the old delight in, and impulse for, research, and he could therefore write, in a letter dated November twenty-fourth, 1844; “Here, where the Homeric figures of the mighty Pharaohs of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties meet me in all their splendor and magnificence, I feel once more as fresh as at the beginning of the journey.” And one must credit his assurance, and profoundly admire the man’s elasticity and enthusiasm for his task, when one surveys the great treasure of inscriptions which he and his assistants amassed there, and the wealth of admirable surveys, maps, sketches, and pictures, which the expedition found time to execute. Five and a half months he devoted to Thebes, and did not leave off until there, too, he had attained his purpose, although he was already on his homeward way and surrounded by unspeakable difficulties and privations, while before him, on the contrary, beckoned with outstretched hands everything to which his heart clung, and which could bring him peace, recreation, honor and spiritual refreshment. His friend Abeken had been forced to leave him at Philae, and although there was no lack of occasional European visitors in Thebes, yet it would have been natural if his taste for travel had by this time abated. But, on the contrary, his passion for research seems just then to have gained a new impetus, and the trip which he undertook from Thebes to the Peninsula of Sinai, after indicating the course to be followed during his absence by the members of the expedition in their various labors, was begun and carried through as though he had just quitted his native land, with an immense surplus stock of energy and enthusiasm. Accompanied only by the younger Weidenbach and the necessary servants, he chose to proceed from Keneh to the Red Sea, not by the usual caravan route, but by the road through the midst of the mountains to Gebel-es-Set. This promised to save time, and he hoped to find on it something interesting and new.