During his years in the British Museum, Budge also sought to establish ties with local antiquities dealers in Egypt and Iraq so that the Museum could buy antiquities from them, and avoid the uncertainty and cost of excavating. This was a 19th-century approach to building a museum collection, and it was changed markedly by more rigorous archaeological practices, technology and cumulative knowledge about assessing artefacts in place. Budge returned from his many missions to Egypt and Iraq with large collections of cuneiform tablets; Syriac, Coptic and Greek manuscripts; as well as significant collections of hieroglyphic papyri. Perhaps his most famous acquisitions from this time were the Papyrus of Ani, a "Book of the Dead"; a copy of Aristotle's lost Constitution of Athens, and the Amarna letters. Budge's prolific and well-planned acquisitions gave the British Museum arguably the best Ancient Near East collections in the world, at a time when European museums were competing to build such collections. In 1900 the Assyriologist Archibald Sayce said to Budge, "What a revolution you have effected in the Oriental Department of the Museum! It is now a veritable history of civilization in a series of object lessons[.]"