Cairo, Budgie Looks Over His Shoulder

Budge was first brought out to Egypt to help dig out some tombs in Aswan. On the way to Aswan in December, 1886, he passed through Cairo in order to hook up with the head of the Aswan dig, Gen. Francis Grenfell. Grenfell was an ardent archeologist who also happened to be in charge of the military in Egypt, or “Sirdar.” Grenfell took Budge to Aswan and helped him immensely by sending back his artifacts in military baggage, thus avoiding customs inspection. Lucky Budge. Budge quickly realized the value of such friends. From then on he would stick to the Military like a lamprey on a lake trout, the ultimate parasite.

As Budge neared Cairo for the first time, he wrote, “...I caught a glimpse of the two larger of the Pyramids of Giza, standing out like a pair of twin breasts against the red light of the western sun. Then the minarets of the citadel appeared in slender beauty, and then many more minarets and domes of mosques, and then, having passed through luxuriant gardens and plantations, we ran into the old Railway Station.”

He went directly to Shepheard’s Hotel, favorite hotel with expatriates and tourists. Originally opened in the early 1840s, it was famed for its grandeur and opulence. Tourists staying there were fascinated by the use of hand clapping to call attendants, a practice encouraged by the management to further maintain the aura of mystery and romance, but being replaced elsewhere by the electric bell.

When I arrived in Cairo, one hundred and twenty three years almost to the day that Budge saw those twin breasts for the first time, I stayed at the Windsor Hotel an old hotel not far from the RR station. When it came to accommodation the Windsor suited me better than Shepheard’s, which is now a convention hotel bearing little resemblance to the original. I did stop in at Shepheard’s for drinks at the Bar, not that Budge would have gone in there, he was a teetotaler.

The two hotels were jointly owned, the Windsor was an annex to Shepheard’s, but prior to that it was the British Officer’s Club in Cairo. In the famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O’Toole as Lawrence visits a terrific ‘club’ in 'Cairo' filled with 'officers,' but it happens to be the lobby and lower level of the Hotel Alfonso in Seville! The Windsor would never do for such a lavish movie. Its lounge is small and less seemly with mounted animal heads on the walls, the remains of small animals shot years ago on desert hunting forays by British officers.

Expatriates from all over the city still gather at the Windsor for drinks in the evening, and the staff are very polite and prompt. It is renowned for its cold beer and snacks, the babaganoush there is world class. Also they offer free internet. On the whole the Windsor is charming but seedy, just the way I like it.

Shepheard’s was destroyed by fire in January 1952 during the uprising in Egypt that led to the July 23 Revolution. At that time British interests were targeted, airline offices, hotels, cinemas, bars and department stores, in all 700 buildings were destroyed, but the Windsor was spared and survived intact.

In Budge’s time not everyone agreed with the military digging out tombs in Aswan, and Budge soon found that the British Consul General didn’t like either him or Grenfell. When Budge went around to pay a courtesy call and present letters of introduction he got an earful. “He was civil to me,” says Budge, “but gave me to understand, with the frankness of which he was such a master, that he was not prepared to support any scheme of excavations by any agent of the Trustees of the British Museum, whether working on their behalf or that of anyone else. He thought that excavations made in Egypt by a British official were likely to ‘complicate political relationships,’ and that the occupation of Egypt by the British ought not to be made an excuse for filching antiquities from the country, whether to England or anywhere else. He spoke with some irritation...and...politely but firmly got me out of his room.”

Budge, as we would expect, shrugged off this warning and went on to Aswan with Grenfell to reap a great horde of artifacts, the famous 24 cases that he promptly sent back to England.

The following year on his second trip he stayed at Hotel Royal in Cairo, but this time he had less time to spare. He was there to follow up on the rumors of a great find at Luxor. He kept a low profile after being warned in Alexandria and he seems to have given up paying courtesy calls, but he didn’t escape being observed. By now everyone knew him, they also knew he was in town and they knew why. The newly appointed Head of Antiquities, Eugene Grébaut, was even having his hotel watched. In addition, it was common knowledge that Grébaut had gotten hold of a Government steamer, a former pleasure yacht of the Pasha, so that he could actively patrol the river to prevent people like Budge from taking advantage of the new ‘finds’ at Luxor. Worse yet, when Budge left Cairo the next day, his fellow passengers on the river boat told him that the police were on board watching his every move.

Budge decided to change his plan, he would take the steamer upriver to Aswan, stopping at Amarna and passing Luxor on the way. Acting as if he were a tourist, who had seen it all, he would stay on board at Luxor and try to shake off his escort. Once he got to Aswan and the coast was clear, he would double back to Luxor.

Budge had crossed the line between the world of museum curators and learned scholars in search of the truth of history, and that of the world of looters and thieves. His conversion from saint to sinner happened the moment he decided it was quite natural and normal for a trusted representative of one of the world’s most respected institutions, to look over his shoulder as he walked along the deck of the steamer bound for Aswan, or to glance around as he opened his cabin door before he slipped inside. From that moment on, Budgie was a man possessed.

© Copyright 2009 John J. Gaudet, All Rights Reserved

Budge Returns for More

Arriving home, Budge was lauded by the Trustees of the British Museum and the Head of his Department. His star was rising as he had just taken his first trip abroad, ever, and as a result the Museum was in possession of twenty-four crates of antiquities that cost them less than £200. Was it possible to do better than that?

They decided to give Budge more slack and sent him out to Bagdad to inspect a Museum “dig.” He was told to stop briefly along the way in Egypt where it was rumored there had been an important “find” of papyri made in Upper Egypt. Little did he know that this would be the most important trip of his life.

He landed in Alexandria in December, 1887, after a rough voyage and immediately made the rounds, looking up important people in the telegraph office, shipping lines, newspapers, antique collectors and the military. By now he realized the importance of having good connections.

But not everyone was happy with his effort to date, Charles Cookson, the British Consul in Alexandria singled him out as a looter. He bluntly told Budge that if he had any idea of taking home any important new “finds” from Luxor to forget it. He was to “...desist wholly from attempting to buy and export antiquities, which was strictly forbidden by the laws of Egypt.”

Budge of course brushed this aside and went on to acquire a collection on his second trip the likes of which were never equaled again until the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. From his arrival on December 16th, until he left on January 21st, within a space of 26 days he purloined three rare documents, hundreds of antiquities, including the Amarna Tablets and, best of all, a copy of the Book of the Dead called the Papyrus of Ani, a 78ft. long roll of papyrus, which he described as, “...the largest, the most perfect, the best preserved, and the best illuminated of all the papyri which date from the second half of the 18th Dynasty (about B.C.1500 to 1400).”

Today the Egyptian Government has mounted an active campaign to retrieve as many of these antiquities as they can. However, museums and collectors claim it would be folly to return such things to Egypt as they do not yet have the facilities or technical staff to cope; they are not “ready” for the responsibility. Yet one look at what has been put in place in Alexandria shows the absurdity of this notion.

I was invited to visit the document restoration lab at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a spectacular new building in glass and white stone, built on the same ground where the Great Library of Alexandria stood in the time of the Ptolemys, in 332 BC, not long after Alexander the Great founded the city.

Located in the Nile Delta, Alexandria was then surrounded by papyrus swamps from which came the raw material for millions of scrolls used worldwide for thousands of years as a source of paper. It was also a plant worshipped by Pharaoh.

The Ptolemys used papyrus from the swamps to fulfill their goal of housing a collection of every known book. In those days that meant scrolls made from papyrus. They intended that Alexandria would become the intellectual center of the world, and in the process they would make money. They kept hundreds of scribes busy, as the Library sent out lists that led to exchanges and more additions and a thriving business flourished in exporting books.

Today the New Library emulates the original as a place of study, a venue for conferences, a site for art and science initiatives and as a cultural showplace for the city. A modern architectural marvel with open stacks and a stream of visitors, and hundreds of thousands of books, and it still has space on its shelves.

While I was there I made the argument that in addition to restoration they should consider an idea put forward by Hassan Ragab, an old friend of mine who passed away in 2004. He suggested that hundreds of scrolls could be reproduced to stock a small section of the New Library. Scroll books of the ancients could be re-created using rolls of modern papyrus paper now produced in Cairo, and this would provide visitors with a feeling of what the Great Library was like in the old days. The star of the show of course would be a 78ft. replica of the Book of the Dead the most valuable item yet stolen by Budge.

I argued that even if you are not a fan of replicas, the idea of a 78ft. illustrated papyrus scroll must excite people, after all Jack Kerouac’s original manuscript of On the Road (a 127ft. scroll) is presently the star of a successful worldwide exhibition.

What makes a 78ft modern papyrus scroll even more attractive is the fact that it would be intact. Budge, after he stole the original in Luxor, cut the 3,500 year old document into 37 pieces for ease of handling!

Next post, On to Cairo!

© Copyright J. Gaudet, 2009, all rights reserved.

On A Sacred Mission

Budge’s first glimpse of Egypt was from the Suez Canal, he did not come through Alexandria until he had finished his first trip and was on his way out. By then he had made his trip up the Nile to Aswan, and in a little more than two months had seen everything he ever wanted to see. He had discovered that the earlier “Rape of the Nile” by Belzoni, Henry Salt and Drovetti had merely scratched the surface. To the practiced eye there was much more to be gained. In his autobiography he describes the wealth of artifacts lying about in Egypt in the 1880’s all being picked over by amateur collectors and Government antiquities agents, but there was a host of wondrous things remaining.

In order to mine this treasure house in a systematic manner, and with an easy conscience, he wrapped himself in a cloak of righteousness, proclaiming it his sacred duty to rescue the lot, leaving the authorities to fester in their own ignorance. Imagine his indignation then when he finally reached Alexandria on his way back to England in February, 1887, and was confronted by the authorities. The effrontery of them! The enjoyment of his visit to Alexandria was “...marred by the attempts made by the Service of Antiquities to prevent the export of my cases...”

He soon recovered his position and was able to fend them off. He had foreseen such difficulties and he had wisely made friends among top military figures in order to prevent such nonsense. If anyone could protect him and his loot it was General de Montmorency, now in charge of the Egyptian Army in Alexandria, who was himself an avid collector and would take Budge’s side against the British Consul-General in Egypt who demanded in writing the return of all antiquities before Budge left.

Budge prevailed, and one day he and the General stood on the quay and were able to watch as his twenty-four cases left the harbor “...under the care of a friendly officer...” bound for England and the British Museum.

The plan of Alexandria resembles a large open umbrella, the top of which is the curved island of Pharos that once held an imposing lighthouse, the seventh wonder of the world. The sides of the umbrella curve east and west providing a harbor on either side, with a a broad bit of land running down the middle, like an umbrella shaft, a causeway dating from the time of Alexander. This is the principle land connection to the mainland. To the left of the shaft is the commercial harbor, vessels enter here after skirting the breakwater and unload at piers near the railway terminus and the entrance to the Mahmoudya Canal. To the right is the picturesque Corniche and the Great Harbor. I can see this from the balcony of my hotel where I am presented with a breathtaking scene. The calm glittering surface of the sea, Mediterranean blue, is framed by the dead white breakwater and reef that continues out from the Corniche and almost encircles the bay. Below I also see wooden fishing boats and small craft many painted blue and white bobbing in the water. I suddenly see why they are the colors of ancient Greece. Some of the boats even look old enough to have been there when Budge loaded his cases of loot onboard a homeward bound vessel.

Until now the chief attractions of the city have been the museum, the Catacombs, the remains of Temple of the Serapium and the temple library, and Pompei’s Piller (in fact, erected in honor of Diocletian). I tour these sights as did Budge and come away with the impression that, as someone once said, “Alexandria is Alexander’s best monument.” The cosmopolitan backwater of Budge’s day with its population of a quarter of a million Europeans, has expanded to five million and has evolved into a young, vibrant modern city, with a new interest in antiquities driven by the recent underwater finds from the harbor.

What did Budge see when he made his tour of the town and the catacombs as I did. First he did his tour under the guidance of an expert, and he included “...several good collections of Alexandrian antiquities in the hands of private collectors.” In other words, he put his time to good use, and in this way he “...learned to know the general characteristics of late Ptolemaic and Roman sculpture, and sepulchral buildings, and the main features of funerary archaeology of the late period.”

Never wasting a minute, Budge came to learn more about what to look for in the way of antiques in Egypt so that when he returned on his next trip he would be primed to clean out the place.


© Copyright J. Gaudet, 2009, all rights reserved.

Budgie the Keeper

A world-class looter


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