E. A. Wallis Budge

Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 – 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East.^[1] He made numerous trips to Egypt and the Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920 he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.

Earlier life

E.A. Wallis Budge was born in 1857 in Bodmin, Cornwall, to Mary Ann Budge, a young woman whose father was a waiter in a Bodmin hotel. Budge's father has never been identified. Budge left Cornwall as a boy, and eventually came to live with his maternal aunt and grandmother in London.^[2]

Budge became interested in languages before he was ten years old, but left school at the age of twelve in 1869 to work as a clerk at the retail firm of W.H. Smith, which sold books, stationery and related products. (It continues to do so.) In his spare time, he studied Hebrew and Syriac with the aid of a volunteer tutor named Charles Seeger. Budge became interested in learning the ancient Assyrian language in 1872, when he also began to spend time in the British Museum. Budge's tutor introduced him to the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities, the pioneer Egyptologist Samuel Birch, and Birch's assistant, the Assyriologist George Smith. Smith helped Budge occasionally with his Assyrian. Birch allowed the youth to study cuneiform tablets in his office and obtained books for him from the British Library of Middle Eastern travel and adventure, such as Sir Austen Henry Layard's Nineveh and Its Remains.

From 1869 to 1878, Budge spent his free time studying Assyrian, and during these years, often spent his lunch break studying at St. Paul's Cathedral. John Stainer, the organist of St. Paul's, noticed Budge's hard work, and met the youth. He wanted to help the working-class boy realize his dream of becoming a scholar. Stainer contacted W.H. Smith, a Conservative Member of Parliament, and the former Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, and asked them to help his young friend. Both Smith and Gladstone agreed to help Stainer to raise money for Budge to attend Cambridge University.^[3]

Budge studied at Cambridge from 1878 to 1883. His subjects included Semitic languages: Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic; he continued to study Assyrian independently. Budge worked closely during these years with William Wright, a noted scholar of Semitic languages, among others.^[3]

Career at the British Museum

Illustration by Budge from Egyptian Ideas Of The Future Life, published 1908

Budge entered the British Museum in 1883 in the recently renamed Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. Initially appointed to the Assyrian section, he soon transferred to the Egyptian section. He studied the ancient Egyptian language with Samuel Birch until the latter's death in 1885. Budge continued to study ancient Egyptian with the new Keeper, Peter le Page Renouf, until the latter's retirement in 1891.

Between 1886 and 1891, Budge was deputed by the British Museum to investigate why cuneiform tablets from British Museum sites in Iraq, which were to be guarded by local agents of the Museum, were showing up in the collections of London antiquities dealers. The British Museum was purchasing these collections of what were their "own" tablets at inflated London market rates. Edward Bond, the Principal Librarian of the Museum, wanted Budge to find the source of the leaks and to seal it. Bond also wanted Budge to establish ties to Iraqi antiquities dealers in order to buy available materials at the reduced local prices, in comparison to those in London. Budge also travelled to Istanbul during these years to obtain a permit from the Ottoman Empire government to reopen the Museum's excavations at these Iraqi sites. The Museum archeologists believed that excavations would reveal more tablets.

During his years in the British Museum, Budge also sought to establish ties with local antiquities dealers in Egypt and Iraq so that the Museum could buy antiquities from them, and avoid the uncertainty and cost of excavating. This was a 19th-century approach to building a museum collection, and it was changed markedly by more rigorous archeological practices, technology and cumulative knowledge about assessing artifacts in place. Budge returned from his many missions to Egypt and Iraq with large collections of cuneiform tablets; Syriac, Coptic and Greek manuscripts; as well as significant collections of hieroglyphic papyri. Perhaps his most famous acquisitions from this time were the Papyrus of Ani, a Book of the Dead; a copy of Aristotle's lost Constitution of Athens, and the Tell al-Amarna tablets. Budge's prolific and well-planned acquisitions gave the British Museum arguably the best Ancient Near East collections in the world, at a time when European museums were competing to build such collections. In 1900 the Assyriologist Archibald Sayce said to Budge, ". . . What a revolution you have effected in the Oriental Department of the Museum! It is now a veritable history of civilization in a series of object lessons . . ."^[4]

Budge became Assistant Keeper in his department after Renouf retired in 1891, and was confirmed as Keeper in 1894. He held this position until 1924, specializing in Egyptology. Budge and collectors for other museums of Europe regarded having the best collection of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the world as a matter of national pride, and there was tremendous competition for such antiquities among them. Museum officials and their local agents smuggled antiquities in diplomatic pouches, bribed customs officials, or simply went to friends or countrymen in the Egyptian Service of Antiquities to ask them to pass their cases of antiquities unopened. During his tenure as Keeper, Budge was noted for his kindness and patience in teaching young visitors to the British Museum.^[5]

Budge's tenure was not without controversy. In 1893 he was sued in the high court by Hormuzd Rassam for both slander and libel. Budge had written that Rassam had used his relatives to smuggle antiquities out of Nineveh and had sent only "rubbish" to the British Museum. The elderly Rassam was upset by these accusations, and when he challenged Budge, he received a partial apology that a later court considered "ungentlemanly". Rassam was supported by the judge but not the jury. After Rassam's death, it was alleged that, while Rassam had made most of the discoveries of antiquities, credit was taken by the staff of the British Museum, notably Henry Layard.^[6]

Literary and social career

Budge was also a prolific author, and he is especially remembered today for his works on ancient Egyptian religion and his hieroglyphic primers. Budge argued that the religion of Osiris had emerged from an indigenous African people:

"There is no doubt", he said of Egyptian religions in Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (1911), "that the beliefs examined herein are of indigenous origin, Nilotic or Sundani in the broadest signification of the word, and I have endeavoured to explain those which cannot be elucidated in any other way, by the evidence which is afforded by the Religions of the modern peoples who live on the great rivers of East, West, and Central Africa . . . Now, if we examine the Religions of modern African peoples, we find that the beliefs underlying them are almost identical with those Ancient Egyptian ones described above. As they are not derived from the Egyptians, it follows that they are the natural product of the religious mind of the natives of certain parts of Africa, which is the same in all periods."

Budge's contention that the religion of the Egyptians was derived from similar religions of the people of northeastern and central Africa was regarded as impossible by his colleagues. At the time, all but a few scholars followed Flinders Petrie in his theory that the culture of Ancient Egypt was derived from an invading Caucasoid "Dynastic Race," which had conquered Egypt in late prehistory and introduced the Pharaonic culture.

Budge's works were widely read by the educated public and among those seeking comparative ethnological data, including James Frazer. He incorporated some of Budge's ideas on Osiris into his ever-growing work on comparative religion, The Golden Bough.

Budge was also interested in the paranormal, and believed in spirits and hauntings. Budge had a number of friends in the Ghost Club (British Library, Manuscript Collections, Ghost Club Archives), a group in London committed to the study of alternative religions and the spirit world. He told his many friends stories of hauntings and other uncanny experiences. Many people in his day who were involved with the occult and spiritualism after losing their faith in Christianity were dedicated to Budge's works, particularly his translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Such writers as the poet William Butler Yeats and James Joyce studied and were influenced by this work of ancient religion. Budge's works on Egyptian religion have remained consistently in print since they entered the public domain.

Budge was a member of the literary and open-minded Savile Club in London, proposed by his friend H. Rider Haggard in 1889, and accepted in 1891. He was a much sought-after dinner guest in London, his humorous stories and anecdotes being famous in his circle. He enjoyed the company of the well-born, many of whom he met when they brought to the British Museum the scarabs and statuettes they had purchased while on holiday in Egypt. Budge never lacked for an invitation to a country house in the summer or to a fashionable townhouse during the London season.^[7]

Though Budge's books remain widely available, since his day both translation and dating accuracy have improved, leading to significant revisions. The common writing style of his era—a lack of clear distinction between opinion and incontrovertible fact—is no longer acceptable in scholarly works.

Later years

Budge was knighted in the 1920 New Year Honours for his distinguished contributions to Egyptology and the British Museum.^[8] In the same year he published his sprawling autobiography, By Nile and Tigris.

He retired from the British Museum in 1924, and lived until 1934. He continued to write and published several books; his last work was From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt (1934).

Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellowship

In his will, Budge established and endowed the Lady Wallis Budge Junior Research Fellowships and graduate scholarships at Cambridge and Oxford universities. These continue to support young Egyptologists at the beginning of their research careers.

In popular culture

• The novelist H. Rider Haggard dedicated his novel Morning Star (1910) to Budge.
• Budge is mentioned briefly in the movie Stargate as the author of several outdated books on Egyptian hieroglyphs.
• Budge is frequently mentioned, though he appears "on-stage" only once, in the Amelia Peabody series of mystery novels by "Elizabeth Peters" (Egyptologist Dr. Barbara Mertz). In Amelia's husband Emerson's dogmatic opinion, Budge is a poor archaeologist and an unscrupulous plunderer of Egypt. The same novels also refer to Flinders Petrie, who never appears on-stage, as a scrupulous, scientific archaeologist and rival to Emerson. Dr. Mertz refers in passing to some of Petrie's eccentric personal habits.
• The children's writer E. Nesbit dedicated her classic novel The Story of the Amulet (1906) to Budge.
• Budge appeared as a major character in the 2006 History Channel docudrama The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Selected works by Wallis Budge

• 1885 The Dwellers On The Nile: Chapters on the Life, Literature, History and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (The Religious Tract Society)
• 1885 The Sarcophagus of Ānchnesrāneferȧb, Queen of Ȧḥmes II, King of Egypt (Whiting and Co., London)
• 1888 The Martyrdom and Miracles of St. George of Cappodocia: The Coptic Texts, (D. Nutt, London)
• 1889 Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics with Sign List, London; 2nd ed. c. 1910 Egyptian Language: Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics with Sign List. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited. Reprinted London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, 1966; Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1983)
• 1891 Babylonian Life and History, The Religious Tract Society, London
• 1893 The Book of Governors: The Historia Monastica of Thomas, Bishop of Margâ, A. D. 840; Edited from Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum and Other Libraries, Volume I and II. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited)
• 1894 The Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1989)
• 1895 The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum; the Egyptian Text with Interlinear Transliteration and Translation, a Running Translation, Introduction, etc. British Museum. (Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1967)
• 1895 First steps in Egyptian: a book for beginners. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., ltd. 1895. p. 321. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• 1896 An Egyptian reading book for beginners: being a series of historical, funereal, moral, religious and mythological texts printed in hieroglyphic characters, together with a transliteration and a complete vocabulary. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., ltd. 1896. p. 592. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• 1896 The life and exploits of Alexander the Great : being a series of translations of the Ethiopic histories of Alexander by the Pseudo-Callisthenes and other writers, with introduction, etc. London : C. J. Clay. 1896. p. 696. Retrieved 2015-07-02. 
• 1896 An Egyptian reading book for beginners. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & co., ltd. 1896. p. 592. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• 1897 The Laughable Stories Collected by Mar Gregory John Bar-Hebraeus, (reprinted Gorgias Press, 2004, ISBN 1-59333-123-1)
• 1899 Easy lessons in Egyptian hieroglyphics with sign list. Volume 3 of Books on Egypt and Chaldaea. K. Paul, Trench, Trübner. 1899. p. 246. Retrieved 2011-07-06. 
• 1899 Egyptian Magic. (London, Kegan Paul. Reprinted New York, Citadel Press, 1997)
• 1900 Egyptian Religion. (London. Reprinted New York, Bell Publishing, 1959)
• 1902 A History of Egypt from the End of the Neolithic Period to the Death of Cleopatra VII, B.C. 30: Egypt and her Asiatic Empire (Henry Frowde -Oxford University Press, American Branch, New York)
• 1904 The Gods of the Egyptians, or, Studies in Egyptian Mythology. 2 vols. (London: Methuen & Co. ltd. Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1969)
• 1904 The Book of Paradise: Being the Histories and Sayings of the Monks and Ascetics of the Egyptian Desert. 2 vols. (London, 1904)
• 1904 The Decrees of Memphis and Canopus, in three volumes; volume 1, The Rosetta Stone. Books on Egypt and Chaldaea, vol. 17. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited, 1904.)
• 1904 The Decrees of Memphis and Canopus, in three volumes; volume 2, The Rosetta Stone. Books on Egypt and Chaldaea, vol. 18. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited, 1904.)
• 1904 The Decrees of Memphis and Canopus, in three volumes; volume 3, The Decree of Canopus. Books on Egypt and Chaldaea, vol. 19. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited, 1904.)
• 1905 The Egyptian Heaven and Hell. 3 vols. Books on Egypt and Chaldaea 20–22. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited. Reprinted New York: Dover Publications., 1996)
• 1907 The Egyptian Sudan, Its History and Monuments. (London, Kegan Paul Reprint New York, AMS Press, 1976).
• 1907 The Nile: Notes for Travellers in Egypt (Thos. Cook & Son, London (10th Ed.)
• 1908 The Book of the Kings of Egypt: Dynasties I-XIX (Vol. I) and Dynasties XX-XXX (Vol. II) Books on Egypt and Chaldaea 23–24. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited. Reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1976)
• 1910 Egyptian Language. Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics, with Sign List. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London and Dover Publications Inc. New York City, Tenth Impression 1970.
• 1911 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Illustrated after Drawings from Egyptian Papyri and Monuments, Volumes I and II. (London: P. L. Warner. Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1973)
• 1912 Legends of the Gods includes The Legend of the destruction of mankind .(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited)
• 1913 The Papyrus of Ani: A Reproduction in Facsimile, The Medici Society, Ltd., London
• 1914 Coptic Martyrdoms etc. In Dialect of Upper Egypt, (Vol. 1) British Museum.
• 1914 Coptic Martyrdoms etc. In Dialect of Upper Egypt, (Vol. 2) British Museum.
• 1920 By Nile and Tigris: A Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on Behalf of the British Museum Between the Years 1886 and 1913. 2 vols. (London, John Murray). Reprinted New York: AMS Press, (1975). Reprinted in one paperback volume, Hardinge Simpole, (2011)
• 1920 An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, With an Index of English Words, King List and Geographical List with Index, List of Hieroglyphic Characters, Coptic and Semitic Alphabets, etc.. (London: John Murry. Reprinted New York: Dover Publications., 1978)
• 1922 The Queen of Sheba & her only son Menyelek; being the history of the departure of God & His Ark of the covenant from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, and the establishment of the religion of the Hebrews & the Solomonic line of kings in that country. ( London, Boston, Mass. [etc.] The Medici Society, limited.)
• 1928 The Divine Origin of the Craft of the Herbalist. London, The Society of Herbalists (Reprinted New York, Dover Books, 1996)
• 1928 A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia. (Reprinted Oosterhout, the Netherlands: Anthropological Publications, 1970)
• 1929 The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum: The Greek, Demotic and Hieroglyphic Texts of the Decree Inscribed on the Rosetta Stone Conferring Additional Honours on Ptolemy V Epiphanes (203–181 B.C.) with English Translations and a Short History of the Decipherment of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and an Appendix Containing Translations of the Stelae of Ṣân (Tanis) and Tall al-Maskhûṭah. London: The Religious Tract Society. (Reprinted New York: Dover Publications, 1989)
• 1929 Mike, The cat who assisted in keeping the main gate of the British Museum from February 1909 to January 1929, R. Clay & Sons, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk
• 1932a The Chronicle of Gregory Abû'l Faraj, 1225–1286, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physcian, Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus; Being the First Part of His Political History of the World, Translated from Syriac. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press. (Reprinted Amsterdam: Apa-Philo Press, 1976)
• 1932b The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son, Menyelek (I); Being the "Book of the Glory of Kings" (Kebra Nagast), a Work Which is Alike the Traditional History of the Establishment of the Religion of the Hebrews in Ethiopia, and the Patent of Sovereignty Which is Now Universally Accepted in Abyssinia as the Symbol of the Divine Authority to Rule Which the Kings of the Solomonic Line Claimed to Have Received Through Their Descent from the House of David; Translated from the Ethiopic. 2nd ed. 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press.)
• 1934 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press (Reprinted New York, Dover Books, 1988)
• 1934 The Wit and Wisdom of the Christian Fathers of Egypt. (Oxford, 1934)

See also

• Gebelein predynastic mummies
• Mike the cat, companion of Wallis Budge, who guarded the courtyard of the British Museum for twenty years

Notes

Further reading

• Becker, Adam H. (2005). "Doctoring the Past in the Present: E. A. Wallis Budge, the Discourse on Magic, and the Colonization of Iraq". History of Religions 44 (3): 175–215. doi:10.1086/429757. 
• British Library, Manuscript Collections, Ghost Club Archives, Add. 52261 (http://www.bl.uk/collections/manuscriptsnamedg.html)
• Budge, E.A. Wallis. 1920. By Nile and Tigris. 2 vols. London, John Murray. Reprinted in one volume, Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole, 2011.
• Drower, Margaret. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archeology (Madison, WI, 1995; 2nd ed.).
• Ismail, Matthew. 2011. Wallis Budge: Magic and Mummies in London and Cairo (Glasgow: Hardinge Simpole).
• Morrell, Robert. 2002. "Budgie…": The Life of Sir E. A. T. Wallis Budge, Egyptologist, Assyriologist, Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, 1892 to 1924. Nottingham: [privately published]

External links

Texts

• Works written by or about Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge at Wikisource
• Works by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about E. A. Wallis Budge at Internet Archive
• Works by E. A. Wallis Budge at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, HTML, formatted with images
• The Book of the Dead translated by E. A. Wallis Budge — online and fully illustrated

Others

• "E.A. Wallis Budge", British Museum
• Geoffrey Graham, Yale University - list discussion of Egyptian dictionary, How to best use Budge's work and appreciate his ability to synthesize - get some education first, Rostau
• E. A. Wallis Budge, "Obituary for Mike The British Museum Cat", Time Magazine, 20 January 1930
• Coptic Martyrdoms etc. In Dialect of Upper Egypt, Volume 1, Edited with English Translation By E. A. Wallis Budge. London: British Museum, 1914, at Coptic Library website
• Coptic Martyrdoms etc. In Dialect of Upper Egypt, Volume 2, Edited with English Translation By E. A. Wallis Budge. London: British Museum, 1914], at Coptic Library website