Hieroglyphic vocabulary to the Theban recension of the Book of the Dead

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.. 1911.

Second edition. New edition revised and enlarged. 8vo 190x125mm. pp. viii, 522. Original tan cloth, some soiling and fading to spine and marks to boards, corners bumped and rubbed. Some foxing, particularly to the edges but otherwise internally very good. A nice copy of the expanded second edition of this dictionary dealing with what is known by scholars as the Theban recension which is the view that in the 18th and 19th Dynasties (i.e. c1549-1070BC) Theban priests revised or redacted the Book of the Dead.
Budge's story is an extraordinary one. Born into poverty in Cornwall, he left school at the age of 12 to work for W.H.Smiths. He studied Hebrew and Syriac in his spare time, began to visit the British Museum and at 15 was learning Assyrian. The Organist of St Paul's Cathedral, John Stainer, saw him studying there in his lunch break and lobbied Budge's employer (W.H.Smith was an MP) and Gladstone and between the three of them, they raised the funds to send Budge to Cambridge in 1878. He studied Semitic languages and joined the British Museum in 1883 where he had a brilliant career building the collections of cuneiform tablets and hieroglyphic papyri. His translations of the Book of the Dead, which then led to dictionaries such as this, were enormously popular.