Jammer Wrote:
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> To play the Devil's advocate;
>
> He was for awhile the pathfinder. He was going
> where no one had before. Yes, he made laughable
> errors, assumptions of fact, assumptions in a
> void, but he still was one of the first.

Surely you must be joking: Budge was not one of the first Egyptologists (Sicard, Rawlinson, Sharpe, Belzoni, Loret, Amelineau, de Morgan, etc. were some of the first Egyptologists, much earlier than Budge, and made far more contributions to Egyptology than Budge ever did, IMO; as such, they also made errors, to be fair, but were far better informed overall than Budge in his lifetime). Budge had a tendency to quote/misquote the works of others without proper citation, and as pointed out on this thread, did not even keep up with current scholarship in the field during his lifetime (particularly in language) (Dawson and Uphill 1995: 72).

His only grace was making Egyptology accessible to the public, in which he put a decidedly pro-Judaeo-Christian flavour to everything he wrote, as he knew that would sell his books. That assisted in boosting interest and funding the the Egyptian Exploration Fund (now Egypt Exploration Society), but contemporaneous scholars of his time thought Budge was out of touch, scholastically speaking.

Some of Budge's shortcomings in overall Egyptology are enumerated in this Ph.D dissertation:

Barto, W. M. 1997. Re's Kingdom in the Empire Where the Sun Never Set: The Nineteenth-Century British Egyptologists and Their Thoughts Concerning Race, Religion, and the Role of Women in Ancient Egypt. Ph. D. Dissertation (Unpublished). Drew University: Madison. (Proquest Dissertation Service)

> what do we have today that we wouldn't had he
> never existed?
> What, for all the wrong reasons, did he preserve
> for posterity?

By the sin of purposeful omission, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Had Budge not rejected Petrie's offer of finds of Petrie's excavations, they would probably still languish in the vaults of the British Museum today. (Budge is alleged to have told Petrie he was rejecting his finds since they weren't "pretty enough" for the British Museum. The story may be apocryphal, but is still told to students at University College London's (UCL) Institute of Archaeology as fact.)

By this rejection, UCL still houses the only "teaching museum" in Egyptian archaeology in the world, as well as being able to publicly display the Coptos Lions outside the UCL Provost's office (I spent some enjoyable afternoons studying these lovelies).

Reference:

Dawson, W. R. and E. P. Uphill. 1995. Who Was Who in Egyptology. Third Ed., Revised. M. L. Bierbrier. London: Egypt Exploration Society.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom