It is a comprehensive work encompassing 3000 years of linguistic history, including Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian as well as hieroglyphic inscriptions of the Classical Greco-Roman period.
The project was undertaken at scientific Academies in Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig and Munich elected by a Commission.
Although cooperative international work was interrupted by World War I, the number of archived source texts had grown to 1,374,806 by 1918.
Erman and Grapow published an intermediate result of the work as the "Egyptian Concise Dictionary" in 1921.
In 1926 the five main volumes, financed by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and autographed by the Danish Egyptologist Wolja Erichsen, were published.