Sir E. A. Wallis Budge

Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (1857–1934) was an English Egyptologist and Assyriologist. From a poor background, he studied Semitic languages at Cambridge with the encouragement of patrons and joined the British Museum, where he served as keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities from 1894 to 1924. He made repeated journeys to Egypt and Mesopotamia to acquire objects and manuscripts for the museum, among them the Papyrus of Ani. He published a vast number of books for scholars and general readers, including translations of The Book of the Dead, an Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary and The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians. He was knighted in 1920.