Biography

Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857-1934), knight and oriental scholar, was born on 27 July 1857 in Turf Street, Bodmin, Cornwall. Budge went up to Cambridge as a non-collegiate student in 1878 to read for the recently established Semitic languages tripos. In 1879 he won the Otway exhibition at Christ's College for Hebrew and Assyrian. He became a scholar of the college in 1881. The following year, after taking his degree, he was awarded the Tyrwhitt university scholarship for Hebrew. He was appointed as an assistant in the British Museum's department of oriental antiquities and remained there for the rest of his career. In January 1892 he became acting assistant keeper of the department, now renamed Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities and in February 1894 he was promoted to keeper, a post which he held until his retirement in 1924. In all he published well over 100 monographs, some of them multi-volume works, together with numerous articles in periodicals. He wrote prolifically on many subjects, producing editions of cuneiform, ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopic texts, accounts of Egyptian history, literature, and religion, guidebooks, catalogues of antiquities, dictionaries, and elementary grammars. Budge was the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford (DLitt), Cambridge (LittD), and Durham (DLitt). He was knighted in 1920. Budge died at 16 Fitzroy Square, London, on 23 November 1934, and was buried at Nunhead cemetery.

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