Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 - 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on...view moreSir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge (27 July 1857 - 23 November 1934) was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. Born in 1857 in Bodmin, Cornwall, he developed an interest in languages before he was ten years old. He left school in 1869 to work but studied Hebrew and Syriac in his spare time. From 1878-1883, he studied Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic at Cambridge University, and thereafter continued to study Assyrian independently. He entered the British Museum in 1883 in the recently renamed Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities and made numerous trips to Egypt and the Sudan on behalf of the museum to buy antiquities, helping to build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. Budge published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920 he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum. In the same year he published his autobiography, By Nile and Tigris. He retired from the British Museum in 1924 and continued to write and publish several books; his last work was From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt (1934). Budge died in 1934 aged 77.view less