Talk:Papyrus of Ani

Suggestions

The current table needs to be changed and expanded, and it should use a better system of divisions and subdivisions for the Papyrus of Ani.

It should also address the vignettes since the text is only have the story and text sometimes doesn't have anything to do with the vignettes. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Crazypower (talk • contribs) 21:04, 15 February 2007 (UTC).

The papyrus was stolen by Budge, it is clearly written in the introduction to the Penguin edition.

Please do not revert this edit. Budge did not simply "discover" the papyrus, he also stole it. To omit this fact is misinformation. Blessant (talk) 05:20, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@Blessant: My understanding was that Budge acquired the Papyrus of Ani on the antiquities market, which was illegal but was not theft. That is certainly what Budge said in his autobiography, which is cited in this article. I don't have access to the Penguin edition to the Book of the Dead; could you quote it more extensively, to show on what grounds Romer makes this accusation? A. Parrot (talk) 07:04, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: Interestingly, Romer cites that same autobiography to make this claim. Here is the context from page xxxiii of the Penguin Classics edition: "By that time, old Budge had alienated virtually all of the younger generations of his profession. In that same year, 1920, and, again, to their acute embarrassment, he published--to popular acclaim--a rollicking two-volume account of his early travels through the East collecting for the British Museum. One of its many scandalous stories describes his participation in the theft of a funerary papyrus from an Egyptian government storeroom, and how he had arranged with officers of the British Administration to have it posted to the museum where, after Budge had published it in fine facsimile as the 'Papyrus of Ani', it became one of the most celebrated Books of the Dead in all the world. No wonder Budge's nickname among the profession was 'Bugbear'. That such a fellow could have compiled such an informative influential work as the Book of the Dead must have been doubly vexing."

This is the paragraph on which I'm basing my edits. No doubt Budge was an accomplished scholar, but something about this acquisition seems suspicious, and I feel that this should be reflected in the article.

It's possible that the illegal acquisition you mention is what, for Romer, is "participat[ing]" in theft. Do you have a quote from his autobiography that details the entire acquisition of the papyrus? Blessant (talk) 17:48, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

I see I didn't have the full story—I was looking at pages 136–137, whereas the incident Romer seems to be referring to is on page 144. The whole book is on Archive.org; here is page 136, and you can page through to see the rest. Budge initially acquired the papyrus as an illegal antiquity, and it was stored in the house of an antiquities dealer named Muhammad Muhassib when police showed up to arrest him and several other dealers and seal up their houses. Muhassib's antiquities, including the Papyrus of Ani, were inside his house when it was sealed off; this must be the "government storeroom" Romer is referring to. The dealers dug under the wall of the house, with Budge's connivance (he distracted the guards), and removed their goods, including the papyrus. So Romer's words may be a bit misleading—it wasn't as if Budge was stealing antiquities that had long been in the government's possession, like those in the Cairo Museum—but the papyrus seems to have been impounded contraband when Budge conspired to take it back from the police. A. Parrot (talk) 00:53, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Removing inline citations message

It seems that for the length of the article, the number of citations is sufficient. Is it time to remove the warning at the top? Astropiloto (talk) 20:36, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Size of the scroll

The size previously recorded in the infobox ("Length: 67 cm (26 in) (frame), Width: 42 cm (17 in) (frame)") is the size of a framed fragment at the British Museum, and the numbers appear to have been copied from item's description at the museum. I changed the length to the number recorded by Budge (78 feet) and changed "Width" to "Height: 13 in," again based on Budge. 05:06, 11 April 2024 (UTC) Bradlegar the Hobbit (talk) 05:06, 11 April 2024 (UTC)