Amulet Atlas

artBudge's amulet plates

also: Amulets and Superstitions (1930), plates · Budge 1930 plates

artAncient EgyptMesopotamiaThe LevantBritain and IrelandEverywhereEgyptIraqUnited Kingdom

Twenty-two plates and three hundred in-text illustrations bound into a 543-page book: E. A. Wallis Budge's "Amulets and superstitions", published in London and New York by Oxford University Press and H. Milford in 1930. The Wellcome Collection's catalogue record gives the collation as xxxix, 543 pages with illustrations, plates and facsimiles, 25 cm tall. A single plate will set an Egyptian scarab beside a Babylonian cylinder, a Hebrew amulet and a Gnostic gem, drawn or photographed to no common scale.

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The story

The subtitle is the argument. Budge's runs to a paragraph — Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Hebrew, Christian, Gnostic and Muslim amulets and talismans and magical figures, with chapters on the evil eye, the origin of the amulet, the pentagon, the swastika, the cross, the properties of stones, rings, divination, numbers, the Kabbâlâh and ancient astrology. Nobody had put that list on one shelf before, and the plates are the list made visible: this atlas's own habit of setting a Cairo object beside a Naples one descends directly from pages laid out like these.

The books have a reputation and it is not a good one. The Egyptologist James Peter Allen writes that Budge's books "were not too reliable when they first appeared and are now woefully outdated". The archaeologist Brian M. Fagan has called Budge "one of the major illegal looters of antiquities": as the British Museum's buyer he smuggled cuneiform tablets out of Iraq by bribery, and gave his own account of one such trip in By Nile and Tigris.

Inference — the plates and the text fail differently, and the difference matters to a reader. A plate records what an object looked like in 1930, which is checkable. The caption records what Budge thought it meant, which is often not. So this atlas cites these pictures for shape and cites almost nothing here for meaning.

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Now

The Wellcome Collection's record for the 1930 edition carries the rights statement "In copyright. It is possible this item is protected by copyright and/or related rights." So the plates are not reproduced here, and no candidate image file is listed below. Later reprints of Budge circulate widely and have kept his readings in print long after Egyptology dropped them.

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What this is near

personE. A. Wallis Budgethe keeper who assembled these plates, and the buyer whose acquisition methods are part of the recordcontrastPetrie's amulet platesthe other amulet picture-book of the period — dug up and sorted, where Budge's was bought and comparedheld-atThe British Museumthe collection Budge built and photographed from, and the one most of these objects still sit incarriesIncantation bowlone of the Mesopotamian classes these plates put in front of a European reader for the first timecarriesMagical gemthe Gnostic and Graeco-Egyptian stones that fill several of the platesstoryWho owns a charmthe long read that starts from how objects like these reached LondonstoryFree to usewhy these plates are named here and not shown here: the catalogue record says in copyright

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

artE. A. Wallis Budgethe plates from his 1930 compendium, the widest single spread of amulet types anybody printedcontrastPetrie's amulet platesthe other great amulet picture-book of the period, made from purchases rather than from digs

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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