Eric Cline

Couldn't happen today.

No, not at all.

Not at all.

But he did say that if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have.

Yeah.

The Department of Antiquities was aware of the discovery, and they were trying to get as many of the tablets as they could.

So Budge hurried down to Luxor and met an antiquities dealer, actually two men, that brought a total of about 81 tablets to him.

And he describes later in his autobiography, reading them by candlelight in a house so that the antiquities department wouldn't see him.

And he says, I realized that I saw Amenhotep III and Akhenaten on these and that they were royal letters.

There's no way that happened.

I mean, I'm sure he was reading them by candlelight in a darkened house, but his Akkadian, his cuneiform knowledge could not have been good enough that he could read them, sight read them on the spot.

He must have done it when he got back to London, but doesn't matter.

He realized they were important enough that he bought them on the spot, packed them up into a box, and then smuggled them out of Egypt.

Well, no, they're written using cuneiform, which is the wedge-shaped writing system.

And the language they're being written in is not Egyptian hieroglyphics that you might expect, but actually in Akkadian.

Akkadian was used over in Mesopotamia, right?

Assyria, Babylonia.

but it was the diplomatic lingua franca of the day, much like French was in Benjamin Franklin's day.

So he was sitting there.

Now, he was undoubtedly trained to a certain extent in how to read cuneiform and Akkadian,