Simon Mackenzie, writing in the British Journal of Criminology in May, 2005, on Law, Regulation and the Illicit Antiquities Market, remarked that looting is a cultural construction: the definition of the action depends upon prevailing sentiment. Lord Elgin of Parthenon marbles fame, and Sir E. A. Wallis Budge were, “British adventurers, rescuers of relics from the unreliable care of native populations to some, and culturally insensitive looters to others. It is safe to say that more people view them as the latter in 2004 than did so in their day.”
Who was this Budge? And how did he come to be mentioned in the same breath as the likes of Lord Elgin? It turns out that Budge was curator of
Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum (also called “the Keeper of the collection”) between 1894 and 1924, translator of the Book of the Dead, and excavator and collector of a great number of other papyri from Egypt and beyond. He was a vastly prolific writer, knew many languages and was a great deal more slippery than Elgin. During his tenure he acquired over 46,000 items for the British Museum, using fair means and foul. “Budgie,” as he was called by his friends, made his first and most famous forays into Egypt in 1886 and 1887, arriving both times during the Christmas vacation. On his first trip he had been sent out to help dig out tombs in Aswan, but he soon caught the “collectors’ itch” and within the course of a few months acquired 1,482 items.
The second trip he made, 1887-1888, was for the sole purpose of collecting rare objects, in pursuit of which he went briefly to Amarna, Aswan, Karnak and Luxor, then on to Suez where his trip ended. By which time he had acquired (some say stolen) the Book of the Dead of Ani, as well as three other rare documents and again hundreds of antiquities, including the Amarna Tablets!
An English-language paper, the Egyptian Gazette, edited and owned by British expatriates, in 1903 said: “We are afraid the Egyptian Government cannot deal effectively with such collectors as Dr. Budge and his like in any direct way, but only through making the tasks which they set the poor natives most difficult and unpleasant to carry out. The only means of dealing with Dr. Budge is to arouse scientific public opinion in England against him and his methods.” This is indeed a harsh judgment, especially coming from foreign nationals in Egypt and directed against one of their own. Their judgment is chilling, asking the people of England to stop him because no one else could!
I thought it would be exciting to go out to Egypt and see the places Budge visited, walk perhaps on the same ground as he, and in the process I could comment on how Budgie’s looting affected the Egyptians of his time, as well as today.
The first stop on my travels would be Alexandria. Appropriately, I would arrive during the Christmas vacation, one hundred and twenty three years later and travel by train as he did to Cairo and from there to Aswan and return.
© Copyright 2009 John J. Gaudet, All Rights Reserved
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