By early 1886, calm had been restored in Egypt and Sudan, excavators working for the Antiquities Service discovered the intact tomb of Sennedjem at Deir el-Medina, and Maspero’s confidence began to return. The clearance of the Sphinx, which Mariette had begun, started again in earnest, supported by public donations and contributions from Egyptologists and philanthropists. Maspero had a small railway built to take away vast quantities of sand and ‘restore the plateau to how it was in pharaonic times’.50
Not all the benefactors were pleased at the results. On being shown ‘his’ Sphinx, Baron de Rothschild grimaced and agreed a further donation of 20,000 francs to the Museum on the express condition that no further work would be done at the Sphinx. Maspero, though, was unrepentant, writing to his wife: ‘The sphinx is such a beautiful work of art. The whole of the front part of the body has now been cleared, the paws freed, and the stela in front of the chest has been revealed. Brugsch has taken a photograph of it which I will send you next week, inshallah . . . When the clearance is finished, I believe I will not be reproached for having wasted my time and my money, or rather France’s money.’51 He was also making good progress with the work at Luxor Temple: ‘The clearance of Luxor Temple, having slowed for three weeks, has taken off again. The order has arrived to requisition the sixteen houses situated to the west of the temple, and to give their owners the land to which they are entitled. The house of Mustapha Aga is among them!’52 And, six weeks later: ‘At Luxor, the governor has succeeded in evacuating thirteen houses out of sixteen: the cadi and Mustapha Aga are still resisting, but will come around eventually.’53
The other great event of 1886 was the first unwrapping of a royal mummy at the Egyptian Museum, an event of such great historical significance that the khedive attended in person. At nine o’clock on the dot, on the morning of 1 June, the first mummy was released from its 3,000-year-old bandages. It was something of a disappointment. So too was the mummy of Ramesses III. The pharaoh’s face was covered with such a thick layer of blackened resin that it was impossible to make out the features.54 Shortly after eleven, Tewfiq left the museum, and the Egyptologists continued their work undisturbed.
After such a series of achievements, Maspero surprised many when he signalled his wish to step down by the end of the year as director of the Antiquities Service and Museum. He no doubt felt that he had done his bit, and wanted to leave while he would still be missed. With Baring’s full support, he was succeeded by another Frenchman, Eugène Grébaut, director of the French archaeological mission to Cairo. Predictably, the Germans were outraged. Heinrich Brugsch had been deprived of the top job when Mariette had died, and now his brother Emile, Maspero’s loyal and long-serving deputy, had been similarly passed over. An anonymous letter to The Times asserted that Emile Brugsch had ‘devoted his entire life to the service of the museum, for a miserly salary. He has unparalleled qualifications for this role, and his likely dismissal would be a grievous loss to Egyptology.’55 From Germany itself came an even more furious reaction. August Eisenlohr, the recently retired professor of Egyptology at Heidelberg, wrote a withering letter to Maspero, asking: ‘Are you such a French nationalist as to have passed over one of us, Brugsch, or Naville, or me?’56 But Maspero shrugged it all off: it was just another manifestation of the long-running rivalry between France, Britain and Germany in the scramble for Egypt. He returned to his professorships and classes at the Collège de France, and in October 1886 had the satisfaction of being elected an honorary vice-president of the EEF, in recognition of his long-standing support for the fund; this was followed, in December, by an honorary fellowship of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and the following summer by an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Some in Britain, evidently, appreciated his contribution to Egyptology.
Petrie and Maspero may have had their disagreements, for example over the sale of small finds from the Egyptian Museum, but generally the two men got along well. They could not, however, have been more different: Maspero was a product of France’s finest academic institutions, well connected, smartly dressed, and worked from his office at the Museum or his official steamer. Petrie was self-taught, a loner by instinct, shabby or déshabillé almost as a point of principle, lived in tents and tombs, and ate out of cans. But the two men shared the same annual rhythm of work, devoting themselves to Egyptian archaeology during the winter months and returning to Europe each summer. Each in his own way was utterly devoted to the cause of Egyptology, and they enjoyed an entente, if not exactly a close friendship.
Maspero’s successor, Eugène Grébaut, was a different kettle of fish entirely. Where Maspero had reserved the site of Saqqara for the Antiquities Service, believing (with reason) that there was still much more to discover, Grébaut added the whole of Thebes. Petrie’s request to excavate there was refused, and he had to look for an alternative site. On a trip up the Nile in the winter of 1886–7 with a recent Oxford graduate, Francis Llewellyn Griffith, Petrie made a mental note of the most promising sites for future excavation. Amarna, Abydos, Coptos: Petrie’s sharp eyes noticed details that others had missed, and he believed ‘there is still something to do in a place which every Egyptologist has visited’.57 The journey was not without incident, and characterized by the privations that became something of a hallmark of a Petrie dig. At Hu, they returned to camp after a long day, had some dinner, then brewed coffee on their stove. Not until Griffith had taken a good sip was it discovered that the camp boy had filled the kettle with paraffin instead of water. At el-Hosh near Edfu, they battled a strong northerly wind while copying inscriptions on the cliffs, and put folded blankets over their heads to protect them from the cold. By the time they reached Aswan, their provisions were nearly exhausted and they subsisted on hard, stale bread, dipped in the Nile to soften it.58 Unsurprisingly, Griffith went down with a heavy cold and rheumatism. Petrie, characteristically, seems to have thrived on the experience.
Despite Petrie’s rupture with the EEF, Amelia Edwards had been busy on his behalf, doing her best to secure him a permanent salaried post at the Egyptian Museum. But both museum and potential candidate realized that it would not work. Petrie admitted: ‘I hate officialism and all pertaining to it . . . all I want is liberty to work where, when and how I like, means to work with, and no interference of anyone else in my business nor in the distribution of my finds: that is my ideal.’59 In place of a job, Edwards did line up new private patrons to fund Petrie’s future excavations. As a gesture of thanks, and rather against his principles, Petrie bought a mummy from a dealer in Luxor that Edwards had requested for a friend of hers. It cost just £20. In Edwards’s words, mummies in those days were ‘as plentiful as strawberries’.60
For the 1887–8 excavation season, Petrie chose Hawara, a somewhat unpromising site in the Fayum. Grébaut was only too happy to grant a permit, since, with the exception of a heavily ruined brick pyramid and the bare traces of its adjoining temple – famed in classical times as the Labyrinth, but long since reduced to a confusing jumble of muddy lines in the sand – it seemed to offer little opportunity for major discoveries. Petrie camped nearby in a small, single tent. As he wrote to Edwards, ‘in this I have to live, to sleep, to wash and to receive visitors’61 – though, one suspects, not much of the third and rather little of the last. By March, the daytime temperature had risen to 106 degrees in the shade, and shade was virtually non-existent. Even the Egyptian workers suffered heatstroke. (This would have concerned Petrie, for, unlike many of his fellow excavators, he was not unsympathetic to his Egyptian workers. He wrote: ‘They are not angels by any means, but they are not all bad according to their lights and way of life, and they do deserve honest treatment.’62) Petrie took refuge in the tunnel being dug into the pyramid, but it was ‘too narrow now to do anything in but sit still, and it swarms with fleas from the workmen so that I have to sit with a big pot of insect powder open at hand to rub in continually’.63 On another occasion, while clearing a tomb, Petrie had to contend with ‘working in the dark for much of the time, stripped naked, and in filthy brackish water . . . you collide with floating coffins or some skulls that go bobbing around’.64
The reward for all his suffering and forbearance was one of the most spectacular discoveries ever made in Egypt: a series of painted portrait heads, dating from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, as fresh as the day they were finished and lively with character and detail. When some of them went on display in his annual summer exhibition, they caused a sensation, and Londoners flocked to see them. In order to accommodate the large number of visitors, the exhibition was held, not at the Royal Institution or University College, but in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, in the very room where Belzoni had staged his exhibition sixty-seven years before.
In August 1888, shortly after the exhibition of portraits had closed, Petrie and a small group of artists and intellectuals met in London to discuss the establishment of a new society, the Committee (later Society) for the Preservation of the Monuments of Ancient Egypt. Its focus was to be different from that of the EEF: preservation rather than excavation. Petrie was not alone in his despair at the rapid destruction of Egyptian monuments, and the committee laid at least some of the blame at the feet of the British colonial authorities. Not only did Baring’s administration have little apparent regard for antiquities, the economic boom ushered in by British rule had also boosted both tourism and industry, with dire consequences for archaeological sites: ‘tombs had become quarries, paintings and reliefs were being hacked out, for souvenirs for sale, and whole blocks removed from the walls’.65 The committee set itself the task of raising funds to pay for guardians and inspectors at archaeological sites, and for flood protection works. It also demanded that metal doors be fixed to the Theban tombs, that the contents of the Egyptian Museum be moved from Bulaq to Giza, where conditions were drier, and that an English inspector-general of monuments be appointed with specific responsibility for site security. During the winter of 1888–9, the committee petitioned the Foreign Office, which agreed to commission a report.
While many of the requests were sensible, and British public opinion was increasingly on the committee’s side, Baring was loath to do anything that might upset the French and their hard-won pre-eminence in cultural matters. Eventually he brokered a compromise: doors would be fitted to the Theban tombs, the temple of Karnak would be protected from salt infiltration, and the Antiquities Service would use the revenues from the tourist tax and admissions charges to carry out further conservation work. But the museum would remain for the time being at Bulaq and there would be no British inspector-general in the Antiquities Service. Petrie resigned from the committee in disgust. It was a familiar pattern when things did not go entirely his own way.66
In any case, he had other things to occupy him, other battles to fight. For when he returned to Hawara for a second season, in October 1888, he was appalled by what he found. While he had been in England over the summer, Grébaut had given permission to an Egyptian antiquities dealer to dig at the site, to rifle it for saleable treasures. To add insult to injury, a unique and beautiful painted sarcophagus which Petrie had spent hours preserving, before delivering it to the Egyptian Museum for safe keeping, had disappeared. When Petrie asked to see it, he was told it had fallen to pieces: it had been left out on the verandah at Bulaq, exposed to the damp of the river and the unrelenting sun.67 Under Grébaut’s direction, it seemed, neither excavations nor the Museum were safe. His six-year tenure at the Antiquities Service was characterized by nepotism, procrastination, and incompetence. Petrie tried to circumvent Grébaut by appealing directly to Baring, but the British consul-general was wary of upsetting the French and ‘the French Consul will go to any length to keep things in French hands’.68 One of Edwards’s last letters to Petrie ended with the words ‘Wishing you every success and a glorious victory over the French’.69
Within a few months of Edwards’s death in 1892, her wish was partly granted when Grébaut was replaced by a more amenable director, Jacques de Morgan. But before Grébaut resigned he saw to it that a raft of antiquities regulations was passed by royal decree. The new laws affirmed the state’s ownership of all antiquities, but allowed that a portion of the finds from an excavation could be given to the excavator to defray expenses, although the government reserved the right to buy back any object it wanted for the Museum. Petrie was furious – as much at Baring for permitting the regulations as at Grébaut for devising them – and even threatened to take French or German citizenship to spite the British government and secure more robust diplomatic support.70 It was never a very serious threat. In the end, on this argument at least, Petrie had to back down, live with the new regulations, and hope for a better relationship with de Morgan.
After completing his spectacularly successful excavations at Hawara, Petrie wrote to a friend that there were five areas in which he considered himself an expert: ‘(1) The fine art of collecting and securing all the requisite information, of realising the importance of everything found and avoiding oversights . . . (2) The weaving of a history out of scattered evidence . . . (3) All details of material, colour, fabric and mechanical questions of tools (4) Archaeological surveying (5) Weights.’71 For once, he was being modest. In the space of less than a decade, through his careful observation, meticulous excavation, detailed record-keeping and prompt publication, Petrie had transformed the practice of archaeology from a mixture of dynamite, earth clearance and treasure-hunting into a precise science. He had also changed the role of the archaeologist: where once, digging had been a part-time diversion for gentleman scholars, it was now a full-time profession for experts. Egyptian archaeology under Petrie, like the British presence in Egypt, had become a permanent occupation.
EIGHT
Scholars and scoundrels
Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, first keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum and a great popularizer of pharaonic civilization.
In the last two decades a change has occurred: the charms of the sensational, which captivated the dilettantes, has for the most disappeared.1
ADOLF ERMAN, 1900
The French stranglehold on Egypt’s two leading cultural institutions – the Antiquities Service and the Egyptian Museum – not only persisted under British occupation, it thrived. Just as Heinrich Brugsch had been passed over in 1881 on the death of Mariette, so his brother Emile was cast aside in 1886, on the resignation of Maspero, in favour of a less qualified French candidate, Grébaut. And in due course, with the backing of the British authorities, the hapless Grébaut was succeeded by another Frenchman, Jacques de Morgan. This pattern of British support for French control would persist long into the twentieth century. But while German scholars were shut out from positions of authority in Egypt, they did not turn their backs on the subject of Egyptology. Quite the opposite.
The extraordinary achievements of Lepsius in the 1840s and ’50s – the expedition to Egypt and Sudan, the publication of the Denkmäler, the reorganization of the Berlin Museum – had laid firm foundations for Egyptology in Germany, and the country’s academic community took the discipline to their hearts. By the 1870s, it could boast five chairs at German universities, more than any other European country. Victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent unification of Germany under Bismarck gave the country a growing sense of its own destiny. Scholarship on the great civilizations of the ancient world was an important part of Germany’s self-image and served to project her own imperial aspirations. As a result, while the new generation of French and British Egyptologists – led by Maspero and Petrie – were busy in the field, their counterparts in Germany, ensconced in their university libraries and studies, were making major advances in the understanding of pharaonic civilization.
The greatest name in German Egyptology in the generation after Lepsius was Adolf Erman (1854–1937). He was just a year younger than Petrie, but as different in temperament as could be imagined. The Erman family were descended from Swiss Protestant émigrés but had become thoroughly integrated in German academic circles. Adolf’s father was a professor of physics at Berlin, and after an initial year of study at Leipzig, Adolf returned to his home city to study under Lepsius. The great man recognized the young scholar’s potential, and secured for him assistant positions in Berlin’s museum and library. At the age of just thirty, following the death of his mentor, Erman stepped into Lepsius’s shoes to become both professor of Egyptology and director of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. He would remain based in the German capital for the rest of his career, travelling to Egypt only occasionally, but arguably doing more to advance understanding of the country’s ancient civilization than any other Egyptologist of his generation, save Petrie.
For German as well as British scholars in the mid-nineteenth century, Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs remained a fundamental primer. For all its colour and detail, it was not especially erudite, but it was all there was. As a young man, Erman studied the work, believing that it answered many of the questions about pharaonic culture and that the task of subsequent scholars was merely to fill in the gaps. But, as he later wrote, ‘as I got to know this famous book more intimately, I could no longer deceive myself that the “ancient Egyptians” as he portrayed them had ever existed’.2 Half a century had elapsed since Wilkinson’s travels in Egypt; scholarship had moved on significantly, aided by new discoveries. Manners and Customs was not just patchy, it was completely out of date. Erman decided therefore to write a new book that would replace it, moreover one that would treat the ancient Egyptians objectively, without any assumption of special wisdom. In his groundbreaking Ägypten und ägyptisches Leben in Altertum (1885), Erman aimed to cut through the mysticism that still surrounded the achievements of the pharaohs, arguing instead that the ancient Egyptians were ‘normal representations of their level of cultural development’.3 For the first time in the history of scholarship, his book did not rely on the biblical or classical traditions, instead prioritizing ancient Egyptian sources and allowing pharaonic culture to be studied on its own terms, through its own voice.
At the same time, Erman’s compatriot, the historian Eduard Meyer (1855–1930), cemented this radical approach with a five-volume Geschichte des Alterthums (1884–1902). The result was not just a fundamental re-evaluation of ancient Egypt, but also a tacit acknowledgement that the dream of earlier generations of scholars – a dream deliberately promoted by the recently established EEF – of finding in Egypt confirmation of the Bible narrative, would never be realized. As more and more Egyptian texts were translated, it turned out that they had little, if anything, to contribute to biblical history; most were in fact rather dull and pedestrian. Moreover, the new evidence being revealed by the archaeologist’s trowel often pointed in different directions or could not be related to the written word. It was Erman’s genius to recognize that the only way to cut through this mass of contradictions and frustrations was to prioritize indigenous, ancient Egyptian material and treat it as a single body of evidence.4
Erman applied the same approach in his role as director of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum.5 He had first worked at the museum as a student, and the wages he had received had given him a measure of financial independence. He never forgot the favour, and when he took over as director in 1884, following Lepsius’s death, he was determined to ensure that the Egyptian collection, so assiduously built up by his predecessor, would continue to rank as one of the greatest in the world – even if that meant some radical changes. Erman was not a natural revolutionary, but he presided over a fundamental reordering of the collection, which had remained in aspic for forty years. He changed both the way in which the artefacts were displayed – providing individual descriptive labels, while allowing each object to speak for itself and the whole collection to demonstrate the development of pharaonic culture – and expanded the holdings through judicious acquisitions. On his first visit to Egypt in the autumn of 1885, just months after taking over at the museum, Erman collected antiquities, focussing especially on manuscripts (reflecting his passion for philology). His keen eye for objects of major historical importance also led him, the following year, to acquire the Amarna Letters. These were a group of clay tablets from an Egyptian diplomatic archive dating to the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten that had been dug up illicitly from the abandoned city of Amarna. Museums in Vienna and Paris had turned them down, believing them to be forgeries. Erman recognized both their authenticity and their historical value. Surpassing even this acquisition, the greatest object to enter the Berlin Museum under Erman’s directorship was the famous ‘Green Head’. Bought from a private collector in England, this extraordinarily lifelike carved stone head of an Egyptian official dated from the early Ptolemaic period and showed a blend of traditional Egyptian and Hellenistic traits. In his autobiography, Erman described it as ‘the greatest masterwork of our collection’.6 It remains so to this day. All in all, the collection expanded under Erman’s direction from 8,500 to an incredible 21,000 objects. In time, he came to be recognized and celebrated as the refounder of the Berlin Egyptian Museum, every bit as influential in its development as his mentor Lepsius.
However, at heart, Erman was neither an archaeologist nor an art historian. By training, instinct and preference, he was a philologist: his first love, and his abiding passion, was the ancient Egyptian language. And it was in this field, above all, that he made a seminal contribution. While Champollion made ancient Egyptian readable, Erman made it truly understandable. His very first monograph, Pluralbildung des Aegyptischen (1878), confirmed his credentials as a linguist and grammarian of rare ability and insight. He was the first scholar to distinguish between the three periods of ancient Egyptian – Old, Middle and Late Egyptian – and his second published work was a grammatical study of the late phase of the language. He was also a fine scholar of Coptic, and the first to recognize the connections between ancient Egyptian and early Semitic languages. His major studies of the Egyptian language were concentrated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, while Petrie was busy revolutionizing Egyptian archaeology. Like Petrie, Erman effectively founded a new discipline – in Erman’s case, Egyptian grammar – and put it on a proper scientific footing.
Erman’s greatest single achievement, and the one for which he is best remembered today, was also his most monumental. In the year of his birth, 1854, the brothers Grimm – best known for their fairy tales – had begun an ambitious project to codify and collate the German language. Their Deutsches Wörterbuch marked a step change from the work of earlier lexicographers. The possibilities of this new systematic approach, combined with a love of the Egyptian language, planted in Erman’s mind the idea for his magnum opus. The project began to crystallize in 1894, when Erman asked his friend and pupil, the American philologist James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), to copy ancient Egyptian inscriptions while on his honeymoon trip up the Nile. Three years later, Erman wrote formally to the Royal Academy in Berlin to propose the compilation of an ancient Egyptian dictionary. The project was finally given the go-ahead in 1899. It was a mammoth undertaking, involving over eighty international collaborators from ten countries. Erman was editor-in-chief, and he gathered around him a team of able young assistants, all of them former, current or future pupils: Breasted, Georg Steindorff, Ludwig Borchardt (1863–1938), Heinrich Schäfer, Kurt Sethe, Hermann Junker, and Alan Gardiner. Even with such a stellar group of scholars, the initial manuscript of the Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache took nearly three years to complete and ran to almost two thousand pages. It was a worthy successor to Lepsius’s Denkmäler by the great man’s star pupil. The only problem was finding the funds to pay for its publication. Fortunately, Breasted was able to secure the patronage of the wealthiest man in the world, John D. Rockefeller, and persuaded him to finance the Wörterbuch.7 The first five volumes eventually appeared between 1926 and 1931, some time after Erman had retired, to be followed by eight further volumes of appendices and indices in the years up to 1963.
Erman never lived to see the full realization of his dream, and, owing to his Jewish ancestry, the last three years of his life were spent under the shadow of proscription by the Nazis. But he had done enough to establish his reputation as the founder of a new school of Egyptology (as practised by his many pupils), and Germany’s most important Egyptologist since Lepsius. One of his protégés, and his co-editor on the Wörterbuch project, Hermann Grapow (1885–1967), made an even bolder claim, saying of Erman that ‘after Champollion and Lepsius, he founded Egyptology anew for the third time’.8 Certainly, in his break with the classical and biblical prejudices of earlier scholars, his emphasis on indigenous sources, his transformational scholarship on the Egyptian language, and – unusually for a scholar of such distinction – his willingness to write books for a popular, non-specialist readership, his career took Egyptology in new directions and pointed the way to the future.9
Erman and his pupils epitomized the ‘German school’ of Egyptology, which favoured building up a larger picture from carefully collected, detailed data. The rival ‘French school’, as practised by Champollion’s successors, took the opposite approach, seeking to establish a general pattern first, to provide an interpretative context for specific observations. Needless to say, Petrie attacked both: Mariette and Maspero for their large-scale, careless excavations; the Germans for ‘armchair’ Egyptology.10 Erman was more accommodating: while he rightly saw himself as pre-eminent in the field of Egyptian philology, he was willing to concede British leadership in Egyptian archaeology, especially as developed and championed by Petrie.11
Not everybody digging in Egypt in the 1880s and ’90s, however, was as meticulous or principled as Petrie. There were still scoundrels as well as scholars operating in the Nile Valley. One of the most controversial characters was Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857–1934). A close contemporary of Erman’s, he could not have been more different in temperament or approach. Budge is regarded today as one of the giants of late nineteenth-century Egyptology, but his interests and methods had more in common with the treasure-hunters of the beginning of the century than with the careful scholarship of Petrie and Erman.
Budge’s very origins are shrouded in mystery. His birth certificate names his father as a ‘Mr Vyvyan’, without further details.12 The name looks to have been hastily added, and it has been suggested that it was a decoy, masking the true identity of Budge’s father to protect the reputation of a public figure. The personal interest taken in Budge’s education and upbringing by the Liberal statesman and future prime minister William Ewart Gladstone is certainly unexpected, given the boy’s modest, provincial origins. In any case, Budge took his mother’s surname, moved from Cornwall to London, and became interested in Egyptian civilization at an early age, often visiting the British Museum. It was while Budge was still at school that a friend of his headmaster introduced him to Birch, the keeper of oriental antiquities at the museum and guardian of the flame of British Egyptology during the fallow years of the mid-nineteenth century (after Wilkinson and his circle had moved on to other interests and before Petrie began his excavations). Birch encouraged Budge to pursue his studies, and provided space in his own office for the young scholar. As Budge later recalled:
When reading or copying in his room I learned to know personally nearly all the great Oriental archaeologists of the day, and nearly all the little band of scholars . . . who had successfully deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the cuneiform inscriptions . . . I saw Gardner Wilkinson on various occasions when he came to discuss with Birch the preparation of a second edition of his popular work on the ‘Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians’ . . . He watched the progress of decipherment with sympathy and interest, but he had no special linguistic talent, and never professed to be an Egyptologist . . . He had neither the gifts nor the enthusiasm which make a great collector . . . On more than one occasion he advised me to get to Egypt as soon as I could, saying that no man who had not seen that country could ever hope to understand its history.13
Already we see the combination of self-confidence and arrogance that were to characterize Budge’s entire career.
With the support of establishment figures like Gladstone and Birch, Budge secured a place at Cambridge in 1878, initially as a ‘non-collegiate student’ before transferring within a year to Christ’s College where he was elected a scholar. He seems to have applied himself diligently – his own description of his time at Cambridge is that it was ‘filled with hard work’14 – and he graduated in Semitic languages in 1882. His two mentors then agreed to create for him a new post, of assistant keeper in Birch’s department; Gladstone (then both prime minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer) used his political influence to have ‘the necessary provision made in the British Museum Estimates for the year’,15 and Budge used the intervening months to further his studies in Arabic, Ethiopic and Talmudic literature. In April 1883, at the start of the new financial year, Budge duly took up his post at the British Museum, the institution that would remain his home for the next four decades.
His immediate task was perhaps not quite as glamorous as he had expected. The transfer between 1880 and 1883 of the museum’s extensive natural history collection to South Kensington – where it would form the core of the new Natural History Museum – provided an opportunity to reorganize the remaining holdings, and Budge spent several months packing and unpacking cases of antiquities as the historical collections spread out to fill the additional gallery space. Birch had welcomed the young man into his department, but in reality had little need for an additional orientalist. He therefore decided to train Budge in Egyptology, and soon spotted an opportunity for him to prove his usefulness.
In the summer of 1886, the sirdar of the Egyptian army, Sir Francis Grenfell, was visiting England and looking for an Egyptologist to excavate the nobles’ tombs at Aswan. Birch recommended Budge, granted him four months’ leave of absence from the museum, and gave him the task of establishing contact with ‘native dealers from whom a regular supply of antiquities might be obtained for the British Museum’.16 The excavations at Aswan would provide the perfect cover for collecting. Once the real purpose behind Budge’s forthcoming trip became known in museum circles, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge gave him a sum of £100 for purchases, while HM Treasury sanctioned a grant of £150.
Budge first set foot on Egyptian soil towards the end of 1886, and the country made an instant impression: ‘When I saw the variety of lights which accompanied the sunrise, it seemed to me that I had entered a new world, and that I had never seen the sun rise before.’17 But romantic thoughts of cloudless climes and starry skies soon gave way to the practical business of the mission, and Budge discovered that he had a natural flair for acquiring antiquities. At Zagazig railway station, en route from Port Said to Cairo: ‘Dealers in anticas from the site of the ancient city of Bubastis climbed up into the carriages from both sides of the line, and the half hour’s halt was agreeably spent in buying good Delta scarabs for two or three piastres apiece, and quite good figures of the cat-headed goddess Bast for a piastre a piece.’18 He soon ‘made the acquaintance and somehow gained the good will of two natives’ who, in the years to come, would supply him with ‘many valuable objects for the Museum’.19 Birch had evidently chosen well.
