Samuel Sharpe (1799–1881) was an English Unitarian banker who, in his leisure hours, made substantial contributions to Egyptology and Biblical translation.

[1][2] His elder brother Sutton Sharpe the younger (1797–1843) was a barrister, and friend of Stendhal and Prosper Mérimée.

[10] Samuel and his brother Henry Rogers were partners in a bank, at 29 Clement's Lane, Lombard Street.

[20] For many years Sharpe and his brothers taught classes to poor children, before office hours, in the Lancasterian school, Harp Alley, Farringdon Street.

He was elected a fellow of the Geological Society about 1827, but took a greater interest in mathematical science and archæological research, as his contributions (1828–31) to the Philosophical Magazine show.

[20] He reminded readers in the 1830s, and again in the 1870s, that about this sum had been extorted from wealthy Dissenters to pay for Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London.

[1] In giving an account of five generations of his family who attended the Newington Green Chapel, Sharpe mentioned that he joined the Unitarian congregation there around 1830.

[23] When, in 1870, the project of the Revised Version was undertaken by the convocation of Canterbury, Sharpe was one of four Unitarian scholars invited to select a member of their body to co-operate with the New Testament company.

He studied the works of Champollion and what had been published by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, learned Coptic, and formed a hieroglyph vocabulary.

The first part (1837) of Sharpe's Egyptian Inscriptions, mainly from the British Museum, contained the largest corpus of hieroglyphical writing that had yet been published, and was followed by additional series in 1841 and 1855.

[20] Sharpe played a significant role in a controversy arising in 1859 over excavations in Egypt by Joseph Hekekyan, supervised also by Leonard Horner, that had been carried out earlier in the 1850s.

On the reliance for stratigraphy on a hypothesis about the rate of deposition of sediment by the River Nile, Sharpe proposed that the site must have had an embankment, upsetting the basis of calculation.

For the Unitarian weekly, The Inquirer, founded in 1842 by Edward Hill, he wrote for some years, though he thought newspaper writing "a bad employment."

He resumed in 1876 when the Christian Life was started by his friend Robert Spears, writing a weekly article till his death.

Alexander Dyce published Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856), which encountered heavy criticism, particularly from family members.