The Collector has published a feature on E.A. Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist who acquired the Book of the Dead and other artefacts and brought them to the West, describing a career marked by intrigue and controversial methods of acquisition. The piece frames his story against the popular image of the fictional adventurer Indiana Jones, but stresses that the drama it recounts was real.
According to The Collector, Budge's activities included sailing down the Nile while evading the authorities, deceiving guards, and tunnelling into buildings to remove valuable objects. The article presents him as a rogue figure whose exploits secured priceless material for Western collections, while raising the questions about method and ownership that such acquisitions now provoke.
The Book of the Dead, the collection of texts at the centre of the feature, is one of the most famous bodies of writing to survive from ancient Egypt. It is not a single fixed book but a set of spells and instructions intended to help the deceased navigate the afterlife. Copies were written on papyrus and placed with the dead, and the surviving manuscripts are a major source for understanding Egyptian ideas about death, judgement and the journey to the next world.
Budge is a familiar name to anyone who has picked up an older guide to hieroglyphs, since his dictionaries and translations circulated widely for decades and shaped how generations of English readers first encountered the script. His scholarship has since been superseded in many respects, and modern Egyptologists treat much of his work with caution, but his role in moving Egyptian texts and objects into British institutions remains a significant part of the discipline's history.
The wider story the article touches on is the one that continues to shadow museum collections today: how objects left Egypt, under what conditions, and who was able to profit from their removal. Figures like Budge operated at a time when the removal of antiquities was common and only loosely regulated, and the consequences of that period are still debated in questions of provenance and repatriation.
Readers who want to move beyond translations and read the funerary texts for themselves can begin learning the signs with the Hierolyte app, which introduces the script one step at a time. The full feature is available on The Collector.