Known as Budgie to his friends, Wallis Budge was driven by the Egyptomania collecting frenzy of the 1890s. Over a period of twenty-five years, he acquired 47,000 artifacts from ancient Egypt for the British Museum. In doing so he committed almost every crime in the book of cultural thievery, acts that would be unforgivable today. All the while he thumbed his nose at anyone who lifted an eyebrow; he abhorred what he called the “archaeological Pecksniffs” of his age. In the case of one of the illustrious four papyrus scrolls, he exceeded himself.
As he explained in his autobiography,1 a dealer friend in Cairo told him that the grapevine had it that a very important work by a fifth century B.C. lyric poet was on the market. Several agents for European museums and three well-known English archaeologists were scouring Cairo looking for it. As a result, the prices for papyri soared.
In November 1896, he made a trip to Egypt specifically to acquire it, despite the fact that everyone who counted said it couldn’t be done. They obviously didn’t know Budge. By previously carrying off several papyri, including Ani’s Papyrus and one featuring Aristotle’s work, he had established himself as a master collector, but he had also created enemies. Even his fellow countrymen, the British government officials in Cairo, as well as the expatriate curators at the Egyptian Museum and the Antiquities Service were all dead set on stopping him from lifting anymore items. In his role as curator in the British Museum, Budge was allowed entry and free access to every corner of the British Empire, and so they couldn’t stop him from coming into Egypt, but they were damned if he would take anything else out without a permit.
And so the scene was set. The odds were against him, postal authorities and custom agents in Alexandria and Port Said were on high alert, and the police followed his every move. There was only one problem: they were too late. Budge had already outwitted everyone even before the chase began.
It happened that he had bought the Greek papyrus in question a few months back. He had made a deal with Omar, the owner, but since he lacked the funds to complete the sale, he left a deposit and told him to hold the document for him; he’d be back. He did copy out a few lines of the text and sent these to the librarian at the British Museum, who cabled back almost immediately, “The text has been identified and it is of great importance. Buy it, by all means.”
Back in Cairo from an upcountry trip, Budge found the sale had become complicated. The Egyptian Service of Antiquities had seen a fragment and word had spread; as a result Omar wanted more money. Budge had to sit with him and bargain for two days and two nights before taking possession, the fact of which leaked out immediately. The Service of Antiquities sent several officials to his hotel to question him, and came away empty-handed. The British consul-general sent him a note telling him to give it up, or else. His answer was to leave Egypt and get back to London as soon as possible. But what about the papyrus?
The papyrus was now known to be a copy of the original Odes of Bacchylides, one of the poets of major significance within the ancient tradition of pure Greek lyric poetry, a poet noted for his elegance and polished style. Also known as the “the nightingale of Kos,” he was a poet who gave pleasure without demanding effort, “a poet with whom the reader could at once feel at home.”2 And it was not simply a line or two that was involved, but an almost complete version of his work. When it was reassembled at the museum it was found to consist of 1,382 lines, comprising twenty poems, six of them nearly complete. In total, there were over 200 fragments in addition to the three larger pieces. In all, the papyrus was fifteen feet long.
When I read that, I wondered how in the world he would ever get such a thing back to London without detection and without destroying it further. It turns out Budge had a simple solution. He bought a collection of photographic scenes of Egypt in a department store in Cairo along with two cardboard covers, a roll of colorful wrapping paper, and some string. He then cut the larger pieces of this priceless antique roll to fit and placed the pieces along with the fragments between the photos before wrapping the whole package and tying it securely.
His next move was to dispatch his luggage by rail to a friend in Port Said, at the northern end of the Suez Canal, the departure port for those going back to England.
In the morning when he and a helper, Ahmad, boarded the Port Said train, he carried with him the package containing the papyrus, layered now between souvenir photo prints, a heavy overcoat that he used to cover the package, and a crate of two hundred oranges. Just before the train started, two officials came into his compartment saying they had come to take his luggage to the van at the end of the train, and when he said that he had sent his luggage to Port Said the day before, they looked under the seats suspiciously and left. Later, when the train stopped at a switching station, Budge, followed by Ahmad, stepped quickly out onto the platform with their belongings, then boarded a train in the opposite direction that went east to Suez, the port at the southern end of the canal on the Red Sea.
They arrived at Suez when it was almost dark and parted: Ahmad taking the overcoat and the package, Budge taking the oranges. They moved on towards the Customs Office, where all hand luggage had to be examined. Once inside the shed, Budge created a diversion while Ahmad left the station and carried the package and overcoat to the nearby house of Budge’s friend. In the Customs shed, Budge’s crate was opened, the oranges were turned out and counted, and the officials called upon him to pay fifteen piastres duty, which he refused to do. Bickering to the amusement of the other passengers and loudly exclaiming they were not for him but a gift for others, he distracted everyone while Ahmad slipped out unnoticed.
Budge then paid the fine, which was not much, and left the station loudly directing that the oranges be sent to a local hospital run by the French sisters in town, thereby proving his innocent intentions.
Later around midnight after a pleasant dinner with his friend in town, Budge boarded a steam launch that carried him and Ahmad, as well as his overcoat and package, out to a passenger liner waiting in Suez Harbor to enter the canal. Once through the canal they stopped at Port Said. There Ahmad disembarked and reclaimed Budge’s luggage, which was then loaded onboard. While this was going on, Budge remained hidden in his cabin. On being asked where Budge was, Ahmad told the Customs officials he was still in Ismailia and would arrive shortly.
Perhaps they were still waiting, as Budge, the “ninja of the paper chase,” disembarked in Southampton a week later wearing a heavy overcoat against the chill and carrying a colorfully wrapped package as he boarded the train to Waterloo Station, London.
Budge left a record; he had probably taken the largest number of items ever removed from Egypt by one man, with the possible exception of Napoleon. Worse than that was his open contempt for the Egyptian Antiquities Service, which left the British Museum with a legacy of scorn that has been difficult to live down. Is it any wonder that over the years they have distanced themselves from Budge and his autobiography?
Late in the Victorian era, professional archaeologists spread out across the hot, dry sands of Middle and Upper Egypt in order to locate and dig up, or buy from local dealers, a considerable number of papyri. In addition to Egyptian funerary documents, classic Greek manuscripts, and the remnants of many early Coptic Christian Bibles, they uncovered business accounts and official and personal records and correspondence.
The story of how Budge “acquired” the Papyrus of Ani in Luxor was the subject of a docudrama on the History Channel, 119 years after it happened. The Discovery film, called The Egyptian Book of the Dead, makes for fascinating viewing. The 2006 version is set in the Victorian colonial period in 1887, with flashbacks to ancient Egypt and the story of Scribe Ani, who is played by a young man worried about afterlife. So worried is he that he is already preparing his Book of the Dead and the other artifacts that will accompany him to his tomb. The docudrama does a great job animating the monsters and perils that await you in your search for the Egyptian heaven. The story is also told of how the Book of the Dead can serve to help us reach what should be our ultimate goal during that final voyage,
Back in real place and time (Luxor in Victorian Egypt, 1887) in the docudrama, Budge is catching hell as the papyri he bought are confiscated by the Egyptian police. In his anxiety over their fate, he believes what his cohorts, the Egyptian dealers, tell him. They claim that the authorities will certainly cut the Ani Papyrus scroll into pieces and sell it piecemeal. Thus, although the film seems to condemn Budge’s tomb robbing, it also justifies the role of Budge as a “rescuer of history,” because it spurs him on to enlist the help of local housebreakers to steal the scrolls from police custody and escape to England. Next there is a scissors scene at the British Museum showing him cutting the scroll into thirty-seven sections for study. This was a technical necessity for research purposes. The ancient scroll would not have withstood repeated unrollings and rerollings, but to the strict conservationist it must vie with a nightmare created by Johnny Depp in the role of Edward Scissorhands.
During the film, the narrators freely interject their views on how and why Budge was or was not guilty, and they make pronouncements on whether or not he was a thief. Malcolm Mosher, a writer and Egyptologist, felt that the fact that Budge took the scroll out of Egypt was quite normal for the time, and “when one considers all the antiquities that were lost, stolen, and destroyed one can only thank someone, who was a bit of a scoundrel, for having the wherewithal to go in and bribe officials and engage in bizarre behavior because he preserved these things. Also, if he didn’t publish as he did, there wouldn’t be the interest in Egyptology that there is today.” Mosher says, “Budge did more to popularize the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the notion of Egyptian afterlife than any other scholar or text.”
Zawi Hawass, however, the former head of antiquities in Egypt, stars in the film and, as expected, was quite outspoken in his condemnation, “. . . you can be an honest man all your life but you see something you want and you become a thief. He used his influence and his scholarship to steal many of the antiquities to put them in the British Museum that was not fair. Budge was a strange person with a good side and a bad side, the good side was his publications, the bad side what he stole. His books are very important, I myself read them today. The only bad thing about Budge is that he did steal antiquities.”
The British Museum is listed under the credits as one of the organizations thanked by the producers of the film, but they seem not to have played any active part, though several scenes are included inside the Egyptian Rooms. Carol Andrews, who was formerly an assistant keeper and senior research assistant in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1971 to 2000 put in a cameo appearance. In reference to Budge, she said, “You can’t look at him from a modern point of view . . . that he’s a cultural thief. This is not the way they looked at it in those days.”
But he was featured in a newspaper report on “Antica Stealing” in 1903 and was named in a plea that “the only means of dealing with Dr. Budge is to arouse scientific public opinion in England against him and his methods”; these run counter to Andrews’s statements. If that is not cultural thievery, it runs very close. And her closing remark that “on the other hand he did sail very close to the wind” doesn’t do justice to the scale of his perfidy.
And there remains the cutting of the scroll. According to James Wasserman (author, Egyptologist, and head of the Book of the Dead Project), Budge unfortunately cut the original papyrus using the basic yardstick method—dividing it into thirty-seven sheets of relatively even length. “The result was to disfigure the flow of the original scroll.” In the preface to Wasserman’s 1994 book, Carol Andrews said,
The original papyrus roll . . . for the sake of convenience of storage and display was divided into thirty-seven framed and glassed sheets, varying in length from 52 cm to 76 cm, the norm being between 65 cm and 70 cm. Budge was sometimes influenced in cutting the roll by what he considered a natural break in the frieze of vignette—even if this led to the text of a chapter being on different sheets. At other times the layout of the text was considered of greater importance, and as a result vignettes have been segmented, some even separated from their relevant chapter. Moreover, as the divisions progressed there came points where, unless the sheets produced were to be abnormally short or long, large-scale vignettes were actually cut in two.
Andrews then detailed fifteen of the most damaging examples of this process, a process that was described in the docudrama thus: “When he got it back to the British Museum, he cut it into sections that he could work with. He arranged to have it pasted to wooden boards so that it could be translated. From a technological point of view one can almost forgive him but, on the other hand, he destroyed the integrity of the papyrus forever.”
Although we know from his own admission that Budge had no qualms about cutting up priceless papyri such as Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution and the Odes of Bacchylides, the actual cutting and mounting of large papyri was done not by him but by other museum staff, under his supervision. In fact, since his time, so many scrolls have been cut into sections that few examples of intact scrolls or scrolls as scrolls are available in museums today; yet in their time the museum had access to hundreds. Where are they?
If Mr. H. Spencer were alive, perhaps he could tell us. He was in charge of the Egyptian and Assyrian Study Room from 1887 to 1889. I found his report among the museum’s correspondence from 1893—at the time Budge was the keeper (the museum’s title for curator in charge). To my eyes, what I read next was a tragedy; but for Mr. Spencer it was all part of a day’s work. After listing his tasks, which involved rearranging and organizing some 50,000 clay tablets and repairing 1,000 others, he turned his attention to 400 papyrus rolls in the museum’s collection, and proceeded to unroll them, cut them up, and mount them all behind glass, including the Papyrus of Ani. There were no alternatives in Budge’s day; a glass plate sandwich was the fastest, most efficient way for the researcher to gain access to the material. The immediate and urgent goal was to translate the text, then photograph and archive these unique treasures before someone else did. The result is demonstrated by the Greenfield Papyrus, which was originally an enormous scroll. Its sheer length was so impressive that a photo taken by Budge, now in the archives of the museum, shows a massive roll in end view. Presumably, this was taken just before it was cut up into ninety-six pieces.
Two ends of intact papyrus roll the Book of the Dead of Princess Nesitanebtashru, 6 in. diam., 123 ft. long, Greenfield Papyrus (from Budge, 1912).
The Greenfield Papyrus was created 2,000 years ago for Nestanebetisheru, daughter of a high priest and member of the royal circle. Donated to the British Museum in 1910 by Mrs. Edith Greenfield, the sections mounted under glass languished in storage for 100 years until they were hung in a major exhibition of the Book of the Dead put on by the British Museum in 2010. The promise that “complete scrolls will be reassembled and presented in their original form for the first time” wasn’t quite fulfilled, as the panels on the wall of the old Reading Room testified. The sad fact is that Spencer was allowed to cut up so many scrolls that an intact scroll is now a rarity. In fact, there are only a limited number of intact scrolls left from the great number that have been discovered. One of the longest scrolls that is still virtually intact and on display is the sixty-three foot Book of the Dead scroll of the Priest of Horus, Imouthes (Imhotep) at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
One thing against the idea of keeping ancient papyrus scrolls on display is that like the Imouthes scroll many are not very colorful. There is nothing to attract the eye of the busy museumgoer. In this regard, the Papyrus of Ani has an advantage, it has many very colorful vignettes, which may also be a drawback in the future as it is now quite certain that the colors have been fading with exposure to light.
The end result of this extraordinary period of paper chasing was that Budge’s arrival in London brought Bacchylides back to life. With about half as many extant verses as Pindar, the poet became one of the best represented of the Greek lyric poets overnight. Budge also introduced the world to Ani the royal scribe, and further advanced the reputations of Aristotle and Herodotus. It was obvious that he would have fitted well with the Florentine book hunters of the 1400s who scoured the world, especially Constantinople and its surrounding environs, for the Greek classics needed to fuel the Renaissance. The Florentines were delighted to have access to the products of Nestorian copyists of the Syrian Desert and the masters of the ninth century in Baghdad, but these were all second- or thirdhand parchment copies. What Budge had acquired were papyrus paper scrolls and books that were closer to the original links with the original authors. His discoveries illustrate well the opinion of Cassiodorus that if papyrus paper had not existed, many an ancient notable would have been reduced to scratching and carving rough letters on bark, an off-putting exercise fit only for primitive man that would keep him further from the immortality for which he were destined.
Before papyrus paper was discovered, all the sayings of the wise, all the thoughts of the ancients, were in danger of perishing. Who could write fluently or pleasantly on the rough bark of trees, though it is from that practice that we call a book Liber? While the scribe was laboriously cutting his letters on the sordid material, his very thought grew cold: a rude contrivance assuredly and only fit for the beginnings of the world. Then was papyrus paper discovered, and therewith was eloquence made possible . . . papyrus paper which keeps the sweet harvest of the mind. (Cassiodorus, 527 A.D. Letters. Book XI, Letter 38)