Budge started the show for me too. "Osiris" was the very first book on Egyptology that I ever purchased and for many years the only one. However, Budge opened my eyes to the vastness of Egyptology. He was not the least bit concerned with who was the model for the sphinx, or how many bricks there were in the GP these seemed to be the two weightiest issues in Egyptology way back and apparently today. No, what Budge seemed to be concerned with was what the Egyptians thought. And to "prove" his point he quoted the original texts in their heiroglyphic form, with transliterations! Since then I've never been satisfied with Manuel de Codage transliterations, either print the original texts or stay quiet. If it was good enough for Budge it should be good enough for everybody. Later I found the BOD text of Ani not only with translation, transliteration, and the original text but a full color pull out of the papyrus. It was amazing! No tanna leaves, no priests muttering incoherent spells to raise the dead, no mummies stalking around the desert. Just one monotonous, pointless, spell after another, my naievete was shattered forever.

As far as Budge missing out on Petrie's collection? So what? Who knows what went on behind the scenes that made him reject it. I'm sure if he wanted to he could have accepted it and then sold it to private collectors if he wanted too and used the cash to buy even nicer goodies. Who knows? I've heard that the French when their concession was up on various sites smashed everything on the site to make sure that the English didn't find anything of value. If you're going to throw rocks at Budge before long you're going to throw rocks at everybody. Right now in the field of paleontology old museum curators are being berated because they didn't collect old chewed up dinosaur bones instead they only wanted complete skeletons. Now with modern technology the old chewed up bones can tell us far more about dinosaur biology, behavior, and biomechanics, than a pristine skeleton can. Same principle (more or less) Budge was guilty of being a museum director and like his brother paleontologists he knew that nobody wanted to come look at some chewed up Triceratops skeleton, they wanted to see pristine T. Rexi's.

Finally Budge helped me obliterate one of the Alternative myths. That was that the Dogon new that sirius was a binary star and their culture went back 5K years....Well you know the drill. Anyhow I knew Budge would never let a good story like this escape his notice, if nothing else other than to ridicule how "stupid" the dogon were. The only reference I could find was a single en pasant remark that the Dogon worshipped Sirisus. Period. So clearly the myth was post Budge. Further scholarship eventually sunk that one for good. It was lousy anthropology long after Budge was dead and gone.

So we can all laugh at Budge and that includes me. But really how many of us have escaped his shadow? How many of us have a copy of his BOD the Papyrus of Ani? On their shelves? Personally I put him more in the line of a modern Herodotus; A man who was trying to make sense out of a subject that he loved dearly but failed miserably at because he couldn't pass up the chance to collect and print a good story.