volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

The Papyrus Secured for the British Museum. 351
of the money, he refused to take it and wanted to give
me back the sum which I had given him by way of
deposit before I went to Upper Egypt. Then he said
that the officials of the Service of Antiquities and some
British officials also were making a fuss about the papyrus,
and that he was afraid to sell it to me. I explained to
him that he had already sold it to me, and, having sat
in his house with him for two days and two nights, on
the evening of the third day we came to terms, and I
returned to Cairo with the papyrus. The fact that I
had taken possession of it leaked out immediately, as
such things always do in the East, and silly rumours got
about as to the price which it was alleged that I had paid
for it. The officials of the Service of Antiquities asked
me to give it up to them, with the name of the native
from whom I had obtained it, and I refused. The British
Consul- General sent me a note telling me to give up the
papyrus, saying that, if I did not, he would ask my
employers, the Trustees of the British Museum, to order
me to do so, and again I refused. I knew that the
threat was no idle one, so, to avoid all complications
and the possible loss of the papyrus, I determined to
buy it for myself and to pay for it out of the sum of
money with which, in view of such a contingency, I
had provided myself in London. The Trustees' regulations
do not permit any of their servants to make
a private collection of any class of antiquities with which
his department deals, but as Greek papyri went to the
Department of Manuscripts and not to the Department
of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, I broke no official
rule in buying the papyrus for myself. The counter-move
which the officials of the Service of Antiquities made was
to warn the Customs authorities at Port Sa'id and
Alexandria to keep a sharp look-out for anticas in passengers'
luggage, and the Postal authorities at these
places were ordered to examine carefully all postal packets
for England.
As it was hopeless to attempt to send the papyrus
out of Egypt packed in a box, I cut it up into sections
and laid them between layers of photographs, bought