Sir e&a wallis budge autobiography

Sir Ernest Wallis Budge in 1930, a bromide print by Bassano Ltd.
© National Portrait Gallery London (NPG 83980),
by kind permission.

t first glance, the life of Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (1857–1934) is like something out of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help: born and brought up in Bodmin, Cornwall, the child of a single mother, young Ernest left school at twelve, but through determination, genius and hard work became one of the leading Egyptologists of the age.

This is all perfectly true. But it is rather misleading.

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For example, Budge himself, looking back, saw his path in life almost set out for him. "Love for the East and for the things of the East was born in me," he writes in his memoir, explaining that generations of his forbears had served in the East India Company (By Nile and Tigris I: 3).

Moreover, his headmaster, who was a relative, gave his pupils the run of his amazing library, well stocked with the classics and various grammar books, leading the boy into a s