Talk:E. A. Wallis Budge
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[edit] Budge's parentage
According to one of my instructors in College, Budge owed his position in the British Museum to the fact he was the illegitimate son of one of the Kings of England (which one has long ago slipped my mind), & many of the works published under his name were ghost-written by BM staffers.
True? False? Persistent academic rumor? Can this be documented? -- llywrch 02:19, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I believe it is well-documented that he was illegitimate, but I really don't know anything else off-hand. As for the ghost-writing, I have no idea, but frankly would not be at all surprised if that were the case. Other well-known Egyptologits who claim a massive output of texts and hold senior levels of responsibility are rumoured to have done the same... (naming no names...) —Nefertum17 07:00, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
No one knows who Budge's father was, though he certainly was illegitimate, something he obviously avoided talking about in public. The wilder guesses, such as that his father was King Edward VII or Prime Minister Gladstone, all derive from the fact that no one could accept that a poor, illegitimate, working class boy with no connections could gain the help of a man such as Gladstone without being related to him. It is true that Gladstone helped Budge to take his degree at Cambridge University, and Budge, a life-long Liberal, always talked up his relation to Gladstone. Yet, Gladstone was just one of several prominent men who pitched in to help Budge, and not even the most active of them. John Stainer, W.H Smith and Smith's business partner William Lethbridge were the driving force behind Budge's escape from his clerical position in Smith's business, and none of them were his father, either. As for the notion that Budge had his works ghosted, again, there is absolutely no proof of this. Budge was a workaholic, he was driven by a need to prove himself, he was a professional writer who wrote many fairly similar books for a popular audience, and he was prone to rush books into print without sufficient attention to details. Not only is there no proof for the ghosting, there is proof that he used his publishing know-how to help his departmental juniors and some of his friends to push their works through the press. One must be very careful when listening to rumours concerning Budge. He had many enemies who became very prominent men, and who trained another generation of prominent men, who lost no time in spreading a wealth of crazy stories about him. He could be a hard man to deal with, but his enemies were just as bad. The difference is that they won the war for posterity's ear. (The above was written by 194.170.173.3 07:09, 18 December 2005)
- Heh. I can make do quite well if these rumors happen to be true (& I'm glad someone stepped forth add some information about them, even just to say that there is no solid evidence for or against them), but I wish he taken more care with his writing. Having read his A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia a couple of times & finding that he too often express one judgement on an issue then a few pages later will contradict himself, I hesitate to rely on any unsubstantiated comment he makes. -- llywrch 01:58, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Verify: 194.170.173.42
The 16 Dec 2005 additions by the above include:
=Early life=
E.A. Wallis Budge was born in Bodmin, Cornwall to Mary Ann Budge, a young woman whose father was a waiter in a Bodmin hotel. Budge's father has never been identified. Budge left Cornwall as a young man, and eventually came to live with his grandmother and aunt in London.
- [?? not by the above:Budge became interested in languages before he was ten years old, but given that he left school at the age of twelve in 1869 to work as a clerk at the firm of W.H. Smith, he mostly studied Hebrew and Syriac with a volunteer tutor. Budge became interested in learning Assyrian in 1872, when he also began to spend time in the British Museum. Budge was introduced to the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities, Samuel Birch, and his assistant, the Assyriologist George Smith, and Smith helped Budge occasionally with his Assyrian, whereas Birch allowed the young man to study cuneiform tablets in his office and obtained books for him to read from the British Library. ]
From 1869 to 1878 Budge spent whatever free time he had from his job at W.H. Smith studying Assyrian, and he often went to St. Paul's Cathedral over his lunch break to study during these years. When the organist of St. Paul's, John Stainer, noticed Budge's hard work, he decided to help the boy to realize his dream of working in a profession that would allow him to study Assyrian, and Stainer contacted Budge's employer, the Conservative Member of Parliament W.H. Smith, as well as the former Liberal Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and asked them to help his young friend. Both Smith and Gladstone agreed to help Stainer to raise money for Budge to attend Cambridge University, where Budge studied Semitic languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic from 1878 to 1883, continuing to study Assyrian on his own. Budge worked closely during these years with the famous scholar of Semitic languages William Wright, among others.
=Career at the British Museum=
Budge entered the British Museum in the re-named Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in 1883, and though he was initially appointed to the Assyrian section, he soon transferred to the Egyptian section, where he began to study the ancient Egyptian language with Samuel Birch until the latter's death in 1885. Budge continued to study ancient Egyptian with the new Keeper, Peter le Page Renouf, until Renouf's retirement in 1891. Between 1886 and 1891, Budge was deputed by the British Museum to investigate why cuneiform tablets from British Museum sites in Iraq, which were supposedly being guarded by local agents of the museum, were showing up in the collections of London antiquities dealers. These collections of tablets were being purchased by the British Museum at London market rates, and the Principal Librarian of the museum wished Budge to find the source of the leaks and to seal it, as well as establishing ties to Iraqi antiquities dealers to buy whatever was available in the local market at much reduced prices. Budge also travelled to Istanbul to obtain from the Ottoman government a permit to excavate these Iraqi sites in order to obtain whatever tablets remained in them. Over the years, Budge also sought to establish ties with local antiquities dealers in Egypt and [[Iraq] so that the British Museum would be able to obtain antiquities from them without the cost of excavating -- a decidedly 19th century approach to building a museum collection. Budge returned from these missions to Egypt and Iraq with enormous 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 beautiful Papyrus of Ani, a fragment of a lost work by Aristotle, and the Tell al-Amarna tablets. Budge's prolific and well-planned acquisitions gave the British Museum arguably the best Ancient Near East collections in the world, and the Assyriologist Archibald Sayce remarked to Budge in 1900, ". . . 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 . . ." }}some of last sentences added subsequenly{{
- Most of 3 paragraphs were added. Look at the history. The accuracy needs to be checked. The reason is that the excerpt about Aristotle has been here for a 1 1-half year time. If it was done on purpose, then the entire additions need to be verified. (after sticking in the dagger, giving some final twitches to it(with the addition)). (from the SonoranDesert(Arizona)- -Mmcannis 17:10, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The comments about Petrie
Were completely hilarious and if true should prove just how non scientific, fringe based and bias our western society is capable of. I also find it quite odd how Budge's work is always referenced (even by his peers) and yet his work is classified as "outdated"? A serious and concise analysis (and let's throw in a non bias for extra measure) of his work needs to be performed for overall accuracy and literal relativity by comparison to so-called "respected" egyptologists. Nuwaubian Hotep 01:15, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
Yes, Budge's work is referenced on the British Museums site. I find it hard to believe that they are urging his work to be avoided all-together, as this page suggested. Some of his works are outdated, that is true, but I find it hard to believe that they would say that the work done in their Museum was trash. Why would I visit the British Museum if past work of curators was considered trash? That doesn't make sense. Budge was an honest man and that burns some people up.
If they were urging his work to be avoided, then why would they list him on the recommended reading list at the British Museum?
http://www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/departments/ancient_egypt_and_sudan/reading_list.aspx#general[1]
The 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica uses Budge's work as a reference under death in Ancient Egypt and refer to him as the renowned Orientalist in the following statement:
According to the renowned Orientalist Sir Wallis Budge, the Egyptians saw the heart as the “source of life and being,” and any damage to it would have resulted in a “second death” in which everything (ka, ba, khu, and ren) would be destroyed. In some sarcophagi one can still read the pathetic plea “spare us a second death.”[2]
It hardly seems like his work "should be avoided" as someone had suggested. Lucky (talk) 01:43, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
[edit] NPOV
"...we should remember that he was unusual among scholars ..."
What is this, a lecture? Change the POV. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.203.251.157 (talk) 07:25, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
