Budge's Acquisition, and the Thirty-seven Cuts

The papyrus came to the British Museum in 1888 through E. A. Wallis Budge, who bought it at Luxor and whose own published account of the transaction is remarkably frank. He describes the Egyptian antiquities service having sealed the house where the papyrus was kept, and describes getting it out anyway. He was proud of it. Read today, the passage is one of the clearer statements of the collecting practices that Egypt has spent a century contesting, made by a man who saw nothing to conceal.

The second thing Budge did is less often mentioned and is arguably worse. The papyrus was intact when he acquired it, a single roll. He cut it into thirty-seven separate sheets, for ease of transport and of mounting, and that is how it has been kept ever since. The cuts cannot be undone. A roll is a sequence and the sequence carries meaning, in the order of the spells and in the way the vignettes are spaced along it, and something of that is lost when it becomes a set of framed panels.

Neither point diminishes the object. It remains the finest illustrated funerary papyrus known and the conservation it has had since has been careful. But the atlas records how a thing arrived as well as what it is, and in this case the arrival is part of a larger argument that has not finished.