Johann Nepomuk Sepp

After he had traveled to Syria, Palestine and Egypt in 1845 and 1846, he was appointed assistant professor in Munich in 1846, but was dismissed in 1847, along with seven of his colleagues, as a result of their involvement in opposition to the elevation of Lola Montez, mistress of Ludwig I of Bavaria, to the nobility.

In 1874, Sepp went to Tyre, Lebanon to excavate the remains of Frederick Barbarossa buried in a cathedral there, during the reign of German Emperor Wilhelm I.

He was sometimes prone to original and idiosyncratic interpretations of history, so was respectfully nicknamed by colleagues "die umgestürzte Bücherkiste" ("the overturned bookcase").

[4] This was a kind of view in hindsight, a compressed, comparative survey of a lifetime of accumulated and processed historical anthropological and religious knowledge; like most of his works, it has not enjoyed a new edition.

While in the Frankfurt National Assembly he belonged to the Catholic Club, and from 1849 to 1856 to the "Society for Constitutional Monarchy and Religious Freedom in Munich",[5] whose spokesman he was at times.