E. A. Wallis Budge

Overview

Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857 to 1934) was an English Egyptologist and Assyriologist at the British Museum, where he joined the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in 1883 and was its Keeper from 1894 to 1924. He was knighted in 1920. His translations of Egyptian religious texts were among the most widely read books on ancient Egypt for much of the twentieth century.

The Amarna Tablets

When the clay tablets later known as the Amarna Letters began to reach the antiquities market after their discovery at Amarna in 1887, some scholars dismissed them as forgeries; the Paris Assyriologist Jules Oppert was among them. Budge judged them genuine and important, and in 1888 bought eighty-two of them for the British Museum, which published them in a catalogue he prepared with Carl Bezold in 1892. His judgement proved correct, and the tablets became one of the principal sources for Canaan in the period before Israel's settlement.

Major Works

His best known work is his translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (1895), followed by The Gods of the Egyptians (1904). By Nile and Tigris (1920) is his account of his collecting journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Reception

Budge's publications were enormously influential but have not worn well. The Egyptologist James P. Allen described his books as "not too reliable when they first appeared" and now "woefully outdated". His methods of acquisition have also been criticised: the archaeologist Brian Fagan called him "one of the major illegal looters of antiquities", and the Egyptology project at Christ's College, Cambridge notes that his removal of material "would be illegal under modern laws". Readers using his translations today should check them against current editions.