ภาพแผ่นภาพเครื่องรางของบัดจ์Budge's amulet plates

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James Peter Allen writes that Budge's books "were not too reliable when they first appeared and are now woefully outdated".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.

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.