Family
Johannes Lepsius was the youngest son of the founder of Egyptology in Germany, the Egyptologist Carl Richard Lepsius and his wife Elisabeth Klein (1828–1899), a great-granddaughter of Friedrich Nicolai. Johannes' parents grew up in a house with a great intellectual horizon. In this house, Johannes met many important personalities of the empire, from politics to culture to religion. There were six siblings, including the geologist and Rector of the Technical University of Darmstadt Richard Lepsius (1851–1915), the chemist and director of the Chemical Factory Griesheim Bernhard Lepsius (1854–1934) and the portrait painter and member of the Prussian Academy of Arts (as of 1916) Reinhold Lepsius (1857–1929).
His grandfather was the Naumburg County Commissioner Peter Carl Lepsius (1775–1853), his great-grandfather Johann August Lepsius (1745–1801) was Mayor of Naumburg upon Saale.
His wife was Margaret (Maggie) Zeller. She came from the internationally known missionary family, the Württembergian Zellers. Her father was Reverend Johannes Zeller (1830–1902), leader of the Gobat School (est. in 1847) in Jerusalem, directed by the Church Missionary Society since 1877. Through her mother Maggie Zeller was a granddaughter of Jerusalem's Bishop Samuel Gobat and a niece of Dora Rappard. Maggie and Lepsius met in Ottoman Jerusalem. Johannes, who was on the board of the Syrian Orphanage from 1884 to 1886, met many problems in Jerusalem due to massacres inflicted on the Christian population in 1860.
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