E. A. Wallis Budge - Career at The British Museum

Career At The British Museum

Budge entered the British Museum in the renamed Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in 1883, and though he was initially appointed to the Assyrian section, he soon transferred to the Egyptian section, where he began to study 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 Renouf's retirement in 1891.

Between 1886 and 1891, Budge was deputed by the British Museum to investigate why it was that cuneiform tablets from British Museum sites in Iraq, which were supposedly being 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 their own tablets at inflated London market rates, and the Principal Librarian of the Museum, Edward Bond, wished Budge to find the source of the leaks and to seal it. Bond also wanted Budge to establish ties to Iraqi antiquities dealers to buy whatever was available in the local market at much reduced prices. Budge also travelled to Istanbul during these years to obtain from the Ottoman government a permit to reopen the Museum's excavations at these Iraqi sites in order to obtain whatever tablets remained in them.

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 would be able to obtain antiquities from them without the uncertainty and cost of excavating—a decidedly 19th century approach to building a museum collection. Budge returned from his many missions to Egypt and Iraq with enormous 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 beautiful Papyrus of Ani, 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, and the Assyriologist Archibald Sayce remarked to Budge in 1900, ". . . 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 . . ."

Budge became Assistant Keeper in his department after Renouf retired in 1891, and was confirmed as Keeper in 1894, a position in which he remained until 1924, specializing in Egyptology. Budge and the other collectors for the 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 Egyptian and Iraqi antiquities among them. These 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 he was noted for his kindness and patience in teaching young visitors to the British Museum. He was one of only two people that Mike the famous cat of the British Museum would allow to feed him.