Gnomon's Guide

Today when we think of an archaeologist, we imagine a cautious and learned professor, carefully scraping away the sand to reveal the treasures of the past. Belzoni was an early 19th Century archaeologist who had more in common with Indiana Jones, opening tombs using a battering ram, hacking his way into the Pyramid of Khafre, and taking anything that could be moved. His life makes an interesting story.

Early Life

Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in Padua, Italy, on 5 November 1778, to Giacomo, a barber, and Teresa, a woman who suffered from very bad headaches. He was generally known as Giambattista or Gio Batta to his friends and family. He was the second of four brothers: Domenico, Giovanni Battista, Francesco and Antonio. Times were hard and their father's work seems to have supported not just the family but a number of relatives as well. Giovanni Battista never got any formal education; he learned to read but never learned to spell, either in Italian or English.

Belzoni didn't leave the city of Padua until he was 13, when the family went on a picnic outing to the countryside. The boy was entranced by this world outside the city he knew, and was determined to see more of it. A couple of days later he ran away from home, along with Antonio aged nine. They travelled 50 miles, as far as Ferrara, before Antonio became homesick and the two boys returned home. When Belzoni was 16, he left home for good, travelling to Rome where, according to his own account of his life, he studied hydraulics. It is not clear what exactly he means, but he may have worked on the wells and fountains of Rome.

In 1798, Napoleon's army invaded Rome and Italy was in a state of chaos. Belzoni couldn't find work in Rome. He had by now grown up and was very big: he was variously described as 'over six feet', 'six feet six inches' or even 'full, if not over, seven feet in height'. Whatever his size, he was also immensely strong. He was worried that he would be drafted into the army, so he left Italy, travelling to France, and then twice to Holland, the second time bringing Francesco with him. From here, at the end of 1802, the two brothers eventually arrived in England, where they adopted the life of the theatre.

Strong Man

Belzoni appeared for a three-month season in the Sadler's Wells Theatre, just outside London. Due to licensing restrictions, this house was not allowed to put on spoken plays (that right being reserved for only four houses in the centre of the city). Instead, the performances consisted of a mixture of pantomime, musicals and circus acts: Belzoni appeared as the 'Patagonian Sampson', a giant who would carry up to 10 men standing on a special cast-iron apparatus around the stage in an act known as the 'human pyramid'. He also acted in any of the plays that required large actors. In 'Jack the Giant Killer' he was the giant; in 'Philip Quarll', a story about a desert-island castaway, he was the Cannibal King.

Belzoni was later ashamed of his performances as a strongman, and didn't mention them at all in his own account of his life. Despite parading himself in front of audiences for a living, he was in fact a quiet and unassuming character. He preferred to refer to himself always as a hydraulics engineer. The Industrial Revolution was well underway in England at this time. Steam engines had just been invented, electricity (known then as 'Galvanism') was being investigated, and new roads were being built everywhere. It was a great time of change, and Belzoni was fascinated by all the science and engineering.

But a man had to live. So for the next ten years, Belzoni toured around the British Isles; mostly he performed his strongman stunts, but occasionally he would present a 'most curious Exhibition of Hydraulicks' with jets of water and fire being shot into the sky.

Belzoni was apparently very good looking: according to Lieutenant-Colonel Fitzclarence, 'He was the handsomest man I ever saw'. This view was also expressed by Sir Walter Scott: 'the handsomest man (for a giant) I ever saw'. Sometime around 1803, Belzoni married a woman called Sarah. We know very little about her but she accompanied him on his touring and later on his trips to far-flung countries.

As the years went by, Belzoni's abilities in the theatrical world improved: he performed airs on 'the musical glasses'; he played the title role in Macbeth (although not necessarily with much of Shakespeare's text); he 'CUT a Man's Head Off!! And put it on Again!!'; and he also presented displays of optical illusions and 'phantasmagoria', projecting images onto screens using primitive gas or oil-powered lamps and lenses.

The Hydraulics Engineer in Egypt

All this time, Napoleon had been busy conquering Europe and Belzoni was reluctant to leave Britain. But in 1812, Napoleon was finally deposed and exiled to Elba. In 1813, Belzoni and Sarah left England under English passports and toured Spain and Portugal. By the end of 1814, they were in Sicily, and Belzoni wrote in a letter to his parents that he was on his way to Constantinople. There was always a demand for circus performers in that city.

Then Belzoni met a man from Egypt who told him that the new ruler of Egypt, the Pasha Muhammad Ali, was trying to modernise his country and was urgently looking for engineers and industrialists. Belzoni at last had a chance to get away from the life of showman and use his knowledge of hydraulics. So in May 1815, Belzoni, Sarah and a young Irish servant called James Curtin set out for Egypt, arriving in Alexandria about three weeks later.

After an inauspicious start in which an outbreak of plague confined them to Alexandria, they made it to Cairo where Belzoni met the Pasha and promised to construct a giant water wheel which would be capable of pumping with just one ox as much water as six traditional Egyptian ox-powered pumps. The Belzonis were given a house in the grounds of the Pasha's palace and a modest salary.

Egypt at the time was mainly occupied by Arabs, but had a ruling class of Turks. Britain and France had fought over Egypt and it was generally reckoned the British would be back soon. So while the supreme ruler, the Pasha, was all in favour of Europeans, their presence was resented by most of the Turks. Belzoni had to tread carefully.

At this stage in Belzoni's life, Egypt's past was just considered an oddity. He went to see the pyramids at Giza, and later with Sarah to the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, but these were typical tourist trips. They were more interested in climbing the pyramids for a good view than speculating on who might have built such enormous constructions.

In June 1816, after nearly a year's work, the water wheel was ready and Belzoni organised a demonstration for the Pasha. Like a giant hamster wheel, the ox stood inside and walked slowly along, pumping the water. This was pitted against six traditional ox-powered pumps. The ox-drivers were determined that this upstart European would not outdo them, so they pushed their oxen to the limit, while Belzoni's lone ox kept to a slow and steady pace. Sure enough, Belzoni's machine matched their output. It was about ten times as good as a traditional pump. The Pasha was delighted, but to save face, he decreed that the new machine was the equal of only four of the old ones.

Then disaster struck. The Pasha asked jokingly how well the wheel would do with humans instead of an ox. About 12 Arabs immediately jumped into it and worked it up to a great speed. James, the servant, joined in the fun. Then suddenly the Arabs had had enough and jumped out. The wheel went wild and James was thrown out, knocking him unconscious and breaking his leg. That was the end of the water wheel project - the Egyptians would never accept the machine now, because it was a potential killer.

Working for Salt

Belzoni was now without a job. He had spent a year constructing the water wheel, but it was quite evident that he was not going to get a contract for making any more, and he hadn't even been fully paid for the first one. It was time to look for a different sort of work.

He heard from the newly arrived British Consul in Cairo, Henry Salt, that the British Museum in London was looking for Egyptian artefacts. In Upper Egypt¹, there were temples and tombs laden with statues and sarcophaguses. The Egyptians had no interest in these things and they were just left lying in the fields. Worse, with the new industrialisation of Egypt, many of them were smashed up to make building material - many of the temples recorded by the first explorers were gone fifty years later, after having survived for thousands of years. The museums of Europe saw nothing wrong in the removal of artefacts from Egypt: not only would they be saved from destruction, but they could be put on display where 'civilised' people could see them.

The Pasha, Muhammad Ali, who was Turkish, not Egyptian, was prepared to allow these relics of a forgotten past to be taken away if it kept the Europeans happy. He was more interested in the new knowledge of industrialisation which the Europeans brought into the country. This digging for archaeological treasure wasn't a free-for-all, though. No European could dig without a permit, and the Pasha only gave these out to certain people. Salt, as British Consul, was ideally placed to get a digging permit, known as a firmin.

The First Trip Up the Nile

Luxor had been the capital of Egypt during the 'Middle' and 'New Kingdoms' and the tombs and temples were particularly thick on the ground there. Salt was interested in one thing in particular in Luxor: the head and shoulders of a giant statue of a forgotten pharaoh. At that time, nobody knew the name of the pharaoh represented by the statue, as the hieroglyphic inscriptions could not yet be read, so he was variously known as Memnon² or Ozymandias³. The same pharaoh was commemorated in countless statues all over Egypt. Today we know him as Ramses II.

Salt commissioned Belzoni to get the head and bring it back to Cairo. The retrieval of the head would be no simple task as it weighed 7 or 8 tons. He also said that Belzoni could collect any other antiquities he could lay his hands on and Salt would cover his expenses.

Belzoni and Sarah set sail immediately to Luxor, departing from Cairo on 30 June 1816. On the way south, they met with Bernardino Drovetti, the head of the French team which was involved in a similar task to Belzoni, collecting artefacts for museums. Drovetti welcomed Belzoni and 'gave' him a present of the lid of a sarcophagus. In fact, the lid was still in its tomb and Drovetti had been unable to remove it. His gift simply meant that he relinquished his claim to it, and let Belzoni take it if he wanted it. Much of the collection of artefacts was done on this basis - once a collector had 'put his name' on a monument, other Europeans were honour-bound not to touch it.

The Head of Ramses II

Belzoni arrived in Luxor on 22 July 1816, and lost no time in finding the head. It was in a temple on the west bank dedicated to Ramses II. This temple is now known as the Ramesseum but at the time was known as the Memnonium. Steam power had not yet reached Egypt⁴ so the most sophisticated equipment Belzoni had at his disposal was a supply of wooden logs. He hired a team of workers and got a carpenter to build a wooden pallet. Then using levers, the head was lifted and the pallet was inserted underneath it. Next, the pallet was lifted and rollers were placed underneath it. Now began the long haul to the river. It took them from 27 July to 12 August to bring the head as far as the river, averaging about 200m each day. Since no suitable boat was available yet to take the head, they left it at the side of the river while Belzoni took a well-deserved rest.

A Trip to Nubia

Belzoni now took the opportunity to find and retrieve the sarcophagus lid which he had been offered by Drovetti. The lid was a massive granite affair and was lying upside down in the tomb of Ramses III. When he turned it over, he found it was an extremely fine piece of work. It's unlikely Drovetti would have let it go if he had known. Belzoni organised the transport of the lid as far as the bank of the river, where he left it for a future date.

Belzoni and Sarah now had time to spare. They decided to go upstream as far as possible and look out for antiquities along the way. The Nile is navigable for much of its length except for short sections of rapids known as cataracts. The first of these as you go upstream is at Aswan, and it was considered the traditional end of the country of Egypt. South (upstream) of this was called Nubia. Nubia was not always considered part of Egypt, but during the New Kingdom it had been conquered and there were many Egyptian temples there⁵.

Just beyond the First Cataract was the town of Philae; here, there was a giant temple to Isis⁶ on an island in the river. Belzoni noted an obelisk near the river which had already fallen over and would be easy to remove. This obelisk later became the key to the decipherment of the hieroglyphs.

The party continued on into Nubia. Sarah was the first European woman in centuries to reach this far up the Nile. To amuse herself, she started collecting chameleons and carried on this hobby for all her time in the Egypt - at one stage, she had 50 or 60 of them.

Abu Simbel

Finally the boat reached Abu Simbel, which was almost at the Second Cataract and as far as the boat could go. Here a few years previously, the Swiss explorer Burckhardt had discovered a giant temple. It was carved into the cliff face at the side of the Nile valley, but sand blowing in from the desert had poured down the cliff and the temple was now under a huge pile of sand. All that was visible was the tops of three giant statues⁷. Belzoni reckoned that the figures were probably seated, in which case the entrance was probably about 35 feet below the level of the sand. He hired a team of labourers and set to work clearing the sand, but they only cleared about 20 feet of sand before it was time to return to Luxor.

Digging in Luxor

Back at Luxor, he set a score of men digging in the temple of Mut (on the east bank) and found 12 statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet. At this stage, there was some friction between Belzoni and the team of French diggers - they claimed that he had moved in on their territory and that the statues were ones they had already uncovered. Belzoni retired and shifted his attention to the west bank.

In the Western Valley (an annexe of the Valley of the Kings), he reckoned he could find a tomb just by noting the pattern of water flow from the occasional torrential rain in the valley. He stuck his walking stick into a pile of rubble at the point where he thought the tomb should be, and sure enough, he found a tomb: it belonged to Ai, a minor official. Belzoni demonstrated this uncanny ability to know where to dig many times in his few years in Egypt.

Back Downstream

A suitable boat finally arrived and Belzoni had the task of putting the giant head onto it using only wooden poles. Despite everybody's opinion that the boat would sink, the job went without any hitches and he and Sarah were now ready to return downstream. They arrived back in Cairo on 15 December 1816. Their trip up the river had taken 5½ months.

Belzoni now organised the loading of the giant head on to a ship to be sent back to London and the British Museum. But he was somewhat surprised that the other things he had collected were set aside and left in Cairo. Salt paid him for his six months' work and gave him two of the lion-headed statues to keep. Belzoni later sold them for cash.

The Second Trip Up the Nile

Belzoni was anxious to get back to Upper Egypt. He had left quite a few artefacts lying beside the Nile, and he was determined to be the first to enter the temple of Abu Simbel. The fame bug had really bitten him. No longer thinking of himself as a hydraulics engineer, he was now the fully fledged archaeologist, ready to make his name famous around the world.

He organised a second trip up the river, and once again, Salt agreed to pay the expenses. The full team consisted of Belzoni himself, an artist called Henry Beechey, a Turkish soldier, an Arab cook and a Greek bureaucrat called Yanni Athanasiou. Sarah had not enjoyed the squalid conditions in Luxor, so she stayed in Cairo. Belzoni had by now grown a huge beard, and some time around now adopted full oriental dress with turban and flowing cloak. This suited the Egyptian climate much better. With anybody else, it might have made them more inconspicuous, but with Belzoni's great size, he was always going to be noticeable. The Turkish soldier was incompetent so they sent him home after a few days.

Luxor

When they got to Luxor, they found that Drovetti was already there, and that he had hired all the available workforce to dig in the temple of Karnak, a vast site on the east bank.

Belzoni went instead to the Valley of the Kings (a rocky valley set into cliffs at the edge of the Western Desert), where the locals were experts at tomb raiding, making a living from selling artefacts on the black market. Belzoni was a likeable character and they made friends with him. He learnt many techniques from them.

Belzoni became an expert at finding 'mummy pits', simple graves which were stacked with mummies. The locals made a living from grinding these up into dust and selling the mummy dust as a medicine, a recognised cure for all ills.

In addition to the mummies, Belzoni assembled a small team of workers and amassed a colossal head of red granite, a beautiful altar with six divinities, and four statues of Sekhmet. He 'parked' these beside his sarcophagus lid at the side of the Nile and left them to go upstream.

The Temple of Abu Simbel

Nubia is far from the sea and has a fully African climate. It now being June, Belzoni's thermometer went off the scale at 124°F (51°C).

At Philae, he met two British Navy officers, James Mangles and Charles Irby. They were interested in travelling up the river as far as the Second Cataract, so they agreed to accompany Belzoni. Then a man called Giovanni Finati arrived - he had converted to Islam and was now known as Muhammad. Salt had sent him to act as a bodyguard for Belzoni. Finally, Sarah arrived, along with James, her Irish servant. She was not happy in Cairo and wanted to be with Belzoni. He, however, refused to take her up to Abu Simbel, so she built a home for herself in the roof of the temple of Isis in Philae, and she and James holed up there for the next two months. Sarah traded with the local women, exchanging beads and small hand mirrors for food, and kept the local men at a distance with her pair of pistols.

At Abu Simbel, Belzoni relied on local labour to clear the sand from in front of the temple, but this was very unreliable. They required continuous bribery, were distracted by fights with neighbouring clans and stopped all work after a week for the month of Ramadan. Belzoni gave up on them and vowed that he and the other Europeans would clear the sand themselves. When they realised there was pay involved, the crew of his boat joined in as well. For two weeks they worked a 7-hour day, three hours in the morning and four in the evening, against constant heckling by the locals. On Monday, 21 July 1817, they reached the bent elbow of one of the statues. This heartened Belzoni, because it proved that the statues were in fact seated as he had thought, so there wasn't too much further to go. On 31 July, they finally opened the doorway at sunset. They decided to wait until the next morning, so on 1 August 1817, Belzoni's group were the first Europeans to enter the Temple of Abu Simbel.

Egyptian temples are all built along similar lines, with a succession of rooms, gateways and pillared halls all lined up along a single axis and ending with the sanctuary or holy of holies. The more important the temple, the more halls and gates there are. The temple of Abu Simbel must surely have been in an out-of-the-way spot, but it was still amazing. The seated figures outside were 62 feet tall from the base to the tip of their crowns. Inside, there was a giant hall with four colossal figures on each side, leading to further rooms in a line at the far end. The sanctuary contained four seated figures, of three gods and of the pharaoh himself. Much of the walls were decorated with pictures of the exploits of the pharaoh who had built it, once again Ramses II. There was, however, very little that could be taken away, so Belzoni got nothing tangible for his efforts. The artist Beechey, assisted by Belzoni who was himself a fine artist, drew many pictures of the inside of the temple. But it was so hot that their own sweat caused the ink in the drawings to run and blur.

Minor Tombs

They started the return journey on 4 August 1817, picking up Sarah and James along the way and arriving back in Luxor by 17 August.

The French were now digging at Qurna on the west Bank, where there are many fine mortuary temples. Belzoni went to the Valley of the Kings. According to Strabo⁸, there were about 40 royal tombs; the Egyptian priests of his day had claimed that there were 47. But in Belzoni's time, only 11 had been discovered, so he was sure there must be some more just waiting to be found. If he could find a royal tomb and it was undisturbed since the time of the pharaoh, then his fame would be established forever. (Today we are almost completely sure that there was only one intact royal tomb left to be discovered, the tomb of Tutankhamun, which was opened about a century later by Howard Carter).

Belzoni started in the Western Valley, a sort of annexe of the main Valley of the Kings. He studied the shape of the valley carefully and decided that there was only one place there could be a tomb - he got his permit to employ 20 men, and they set to work. Sure enough, exactly where he had predicted, they found the entrance to a tomb. There was no way to enter other than to break down the door, so Belzoni devised a simple battering ram using the trunk of a palm tree swinging from ropes. The tomb turned out to be an unadorned room with eight sarcophaguses⁹, each with a mummy. There were no names and no grave goods, indicating that the people concerned were only minor royalty.

Next he went to the main Valley of the Kings. On 9 October, he found the tomb of Mentuherkhepeshef ('Mentoo-her-khepesh-ef'), a prince and scribe. The mummy of the prince was there, but there were no grave goods, indicating that the tomb had been looted in antiquity. There were some good wall paintings, but the tomb looked unfinished. This was a common occurrence in Ancient Egypt - during life a rich man would pay to have a tomb made, but the tomb was often not finished when the man died, so he was buried in an unfinished tomb. The same day, Belzoni's team discovered a second tomb: this one was unadorned and completely empty except for two naked mummies.

The following day, Belzoni found his first royal tomb - that of Ramses I, the grandfather of the Ramses II depicted in all the giant statues around Egypt. The elder Ramses had only ruled for two years so his tomb was small and unfinished. Again, the wall paintings were good, but the tomb had been raided in antiquity and there were no grave goods.

The Tomb of Seti I

On 16 October, Belzoni returned to the Valley and using his knowledge of hydraulics, studied the paths of the occasional torrents in the valley. He reckoned there was a sink-hole at one point, where more water flowed in than flowed out. He directed his workers to dig in the rubble there. Two days later, they uncovered a cut stone passageway and a doorway. This led to the most amazing tomb ever discovered in Egypt - the tomb of Seti I, the son of Ramses I and father of Ramses II. Although it had been raided in antiquity, it had the most amazing wall carvings ever seen, and they all still bore their original paint, making them vibrant and bright. There was also an amazing sarcophagus made from alabaster and inscribed in great detail with hieroglyphs. Until the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb, this was considered the finest single work to come out of Egypt. The lid of the sarcophagus was gone, and the smashed remains of it were later found near the entrance among some rubble - the thieves had obviously failed to remove it.

There was no mummy. Records show that the priests of the day had been worried about the tombs being raided; they took the mummies of many of the pharaohs and hid them in a cleft in the cliff, where they weren't discovered until 1881, long after Belzoni's time. The mummy of Seti I was among the cache, and is now on display in the museum in Cairo.

Egyptian rock tombs are carved directly into the face of the cliffs at the west side of the Nile Valley. They are basically a passageway leading downwards into a room where the mummy is placed in a sarcophagus. But there are three factors which make the tombs more elaborate. Firstly, the longer the tomb, the more impressive it is, so rich people will pay for tombs with longer entranceways and more rooms than the less well off. Pharaohs will have the biggest tombs of all. Secondly, the tomb is normally commissioned while the person to be buried is alive. If the tomb is finished, he may pay to extend it, and this process continues until the person dies. In the case of a long-lived pharaoh like Ramses II, the tomb can be many hundreds of feet long, with numerous rooms and passages all proceeding in a general straight line into the cliff face. Thirdly, to deter tomb raiders, there are a number of false walls and hidden doors in the tomb, in the hope that the raiders will think they have reached the end of an unused tomb and will give up. Such wishful thinking always turned out to be false. As far as we know, all the ancient tombs except one were stripped of their grave goods by the raiders and none of the anti-theft devices were successful.

The tomb of Seti shows all these features. It is 328 feet long from the door in the rock face to the very furthest extremity. In every passage and in every room except two, all available vertical surfaces are covered in brightly painted relief pictures: the pharaoh, the gods, hieroglyphic passages from the Book of the Dead and so on. There are a number of rooms along the way which could have served as the final resting place of the pharaoh had he died earlier. There is an unfinished and unpainted section beyond the burial chamber, which would probably have been expanded into an even more impressive burial chamber if the pharaoh had lived longer. And there are false walls and secret passages too: the main descending passage comes to a deep pit, the far wall of which is flat without an opening. But the thieves broke through it at the level opposite the passage, and found that the tomb continues on. Belzoni could still see the remains of their ropes descending into the pit and up the other side, although they crumbled to dust when he touched them. Further along in the tomb, there is an unfinished room which appears to be the end of the tomb, with wall paintings only sketched out. But in the second last room, offset from the centre, there is a passage down into the floor, which was presumably originally covered by a false floor. This leads into the actual burial chamber.

Belzoni received great kudos from discovering the tomb. He took many visitors on tours of it, although the Arabs and Turks lost interest when they found there was no treasure. Salt himself arrived in Luxor on 16 November, with some English visitors. Belzoni showed them all around the tomb; he was somewhat peeved to find the visitors congratulating Salt for the discovery of the tomb.

Nevertheless, there was work to be done. Belzoni had collected a large number of antiquities and these had to all be shipped to Cairo, so Belzoni and Sarah headed back downstream.

A New Year Arrives

Early in the new year of 1818, Sarah decided she had had enough of Egypt. It was clear that Belzoni was going to have to go up to Luxor again, and she did not want to endure the squalid conditions there, so she went on a trip to visit the Holy Land (Palestine). Belzoni lived at the Consulate in Cairo.

The Pyramid of Khafre

Some English people had come to visit Salt, but he was still up in Luxor. Belzoni accompanied them to the pyramids on a sightseeing trip. While the others went inside the Great Pyramid, Belzoni stayed outside and spent the time looking carefully at the second pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre. This is almost as tall as the Great Pyramid but not as wide at the base. Although ancient Egyptian histories listed it as the tomb of the Pharaoh Khafre, no entrance to it was known to exist in modern times. By now, Belzoni had developed a remarkable eye for where to dig, and he applied it to the pyramid. He saw that the outer casing had fallen off and formed a mound of rubble around the base of the pyramid, and that if the entrance to the pyramid was in the same place as that on the Great Pyramid, then it would be covered by the rubble. He decided to do some digging, but not under the employ of Salt. This one he would do at his own expense, and claim all the credit.

Next day, he wrote to Salt to say that he had some private business to attend to in Cairo. He approached the necessary officials and got his digging permit, then hired some workers. They started the excavations at the point where Belzoni reckoned the entrance might be found. After two days they had found nothing. Then Belzoni noticed that the entrance on the other pyramid was offset slightly from the centre line on the pyramid, by about 30 metres, something he hadn't noticed before. Hacking into the Pyramid of Khafre at the equivalent point, his team quickly found a passageway in the surface of the pyramid, and Belzoni was the first to enter. Inside the pyramid, he found a couple of chambers, one with a giant sarcophagus set into the floor, but no sign of any mummy. Then he found some graffiti in the pyramid in Arabic. Belzoni didn't understand the Arabic script, but it was clear that some Arabic-speaking person in the past had opened the pyramid. Whether it was they who had rifled the tomb or whether it had been done thousands of years earlier it is impossible now to say. Belzoni carved his name in giant letters in the main chamber, so that nobody would forget that this was his discovery and his alone.

An Argument with Salt

Salt now returned from Luxor. When Belzoni and he met, there was a furious argument. Belzoni wanted fame - he was eager to collect antiquities because he thought his name would be recorded as the discoverer when they went on display in the museum. Salt on the other hand considered Belzoni as an employee. He likened him to an architect, who uses his skill to design a house but at the end of the day, the house would belong to Salt.

Belzoni had originally thought he was being employed to collect for the British Museum directly, but he had gradually discovered that he was collecting for Salt on a personal basis, and that Salt would sell his collection to whatever museum gave him the best price. The objects would then be listed in the museum as 'from the Henry Salt collection' without any reference to Belzoni. The great Italian was worried that his genius for discovering the ancient treasures would be forgotten and he'd have nothing to show for it at the end except a meagre salary.

Salt for his part couldn't understand Belzoni's point of view, which is a pity, because they could have gone on to make many more discoveries together. But eventually, he hammered out a written agreement with Belzoni, paying him for his services partly in cash and partly in antiquities. Belzoni got some of the statues of Sekhmet, half shares in the alabaster sarcophagus and the right to do further digging for a private collection of his own.

Belzoni's greatest discovery was the Tomb of Seti, but it was firmly rooted in the rock of Luxor. Now the showman within him came to the fore. He decided he would make a plaster copy of the tomb and would put it on exhibition in London, where many people would pay to see it.

He travelled up to Luxor again, where he proceeded to make wax casts of all the carvings in the tomb. At the same time, he hired an Italian doctor, Alessandro Ricci, to copy everything down on paper, paying particular attention to the colours. Together they spent the whole of the summer of 1818 faithfully reproducing the details of the tomb. By September, he had everything he needed to make a plaster cast copy of the entire tomb.

The Lost City of Berenikë

At around this time, news came to Belzoni of a French explorer and mineralogist named Frédéric Cailliaud who had found an emerald mine and an ancient mining town dating from Greek times (330–100 BC) in the Eastern Desert. Belzoni decided this might be a clue to the location of the lost city of Berenikë ('beren-ee-kay'). This was a port on the Red Sea in ancient times, with a road across the desert from the Nile, but its exact location had been forgotten. If this mining town was on the route, then he might be able to continue past it and find Berenikë. Belzoni hired sixteen camels and assembled a team, including Beechey, Yanni, and Dr Ricci, as well as a native guide. They set out on 23 September 1818 into the desert.

Egypt's Eastern Desert is very different from the desert of most people's imagination. There's no sand, but it is rocky, and in places mountainous. There were many precious stones to be found in these mountains and in ancient times Egypt's wealth of jewels came from mines here. But the land is extremely inhospitable and totally lifeless. This was a different sort of adventure to anything Belzoni had tried before. Two days out from the Nile, Ricci became seriously ill, so Belzoni sent him back to Luxor. On 30 September, they reached the emerald mine that Cailliaud had found, which was now being investigated by servants of the Pasha. They vaguely remembered the ancient ruined mining town, but didn't know where it was.

A local Arabic tribesman was found who thought he knew it, so they followed his lead for a day, but when they came to the small mound of ruins, Belzoni couldn't believe this was the enormous mining town that Cailliaud had spoken of. He decided to press on to the Red Sea; a couple of days later they reached the sea, where Belzoni and Beechey went for a swim. Water was not now a problem as there were abundant water holes, but they had only enough food left now for 17 days, including the trip home.

Belzoni's studies showed that the ancient city was built just south of a small cape known on his maps as Cape Lepte Extrema, but to us today as Ras Banas. They were now north of this cape, so they headed south. He sent the camel drivers off to get water while he continued exploring. They met some fishermen and bought some fish off them. Belzoni also stocked up on shellfish from the rocks. On 6 October, the camels returned with water. Now Belzoni split the team and sent as many as possible of the camels back to wait at the water hole. The rest continued south along the coast. On 7 October they reached some old sulphur mines, and later, the cape. On 9 October around noon, they crossed the cape and reached the sea on the south side. There beside the sea were a series of low mounds covered in sand. Belzoni immediately recognised the ruins of a city. Berenikë had been found!

They didn't have much time to look around. The camel drivers wanted to get back as quick as possible as water was running low again. Belzoni and Beechey spent the rest of the day and half the night (by a bright moon) digging out sand and looking at the ruins. The buildings were all made from madrepore, a type of rock with very visible fossils of sea creatures in it. At the highest point of the city there was the remains of a temple, 102 feet by 43 feet. The whole city had, in his reckoning, about 2,000 buildings. Belzoni took away one tablet of red breccia stone covered in hieroglyphs. At noon the next day it was time to go, and they began the long trek back to the Nile. On 23 October, after a full month in the desert, they arrived back at the river. Four of the camels had died along the way. All Belzoni had got was one stone tablet; that and the glory of being a Discoverer.

The Retrieval of the Obelisk of Philae

Two years previously, Belzoni had put his name on the fallen obelisk at Philae. By the new agreement with Salt, this meant that it belonged to Salt, but he gave it a friend of his, a visiting Englishman called Bankes. Bankes really wanted an Egyptian obelisk for his estate in Kingston Lacy, Dorset, so he paid Belzoni to get the obelisk and bring it back to England.

Belzoni met Drovetti in Luxor and mentioned to him that he was going to Philae to get the obelisk. Drovetti was surprised - he had been promised it by the locals. But he graciously waived his claim when he heard Belzoni had a prior one. Not so Drovetti's agents, Lebolo and Rossignol, though. They would have got commission for transporting the obelisk if Drovetti had taken it. Lebolo rushed off to Philae immediately and got there before Belzoni; but Belzoni had placed a guard on the obelisk two years previously, and the Frenchman couldn't take it. This led to a lot of friction with the French agents.

The loading of the obelisk on to the boat didn't go quite as planned - Belzoni's workers built a pier into the Nile, but the pier collapsed and the obelisk fell into the river. He had to use levers underwater to lift the obelisk back on to land before loading it onto the boat. Then the boat had to be brought down the cataract by pulling it with ropes from the bank.

Belzoni is Attacked

Belzoni and the obelisk arrived back in Luxor in December 1818. Here he was met by Sarah, who was back from her Holy Lands trip. They started to pack up and prepare for their return to England. Everything was looking rosy.

On 26 December, he went riding around the temple of Karnak. He was suddenly surrounded by a gang of French diggers and collectors, led by Lebolo and Rossignol. They shouted at him to get down off his horse, but he wouldn't, being scared of what they might do to him. Then somebody fired a gun behind Belzoni. He jumped down immediately. At that moment, luckily, Drovetti arrived and defused the situation. Belzoni was convinced that his life had been threatened and was seriously shaken by the affair.

Goodbye to Egypt

When Sarah heard about it, she wanted out of there as soon as possible. Even so, it took Belzoni a month to gather together all the things he had accumulated in Luxor over the years. Eventually, on 27 January 1819, they sailed downstream for the last time, all the way as far as the mouth of the Nile at Rashid (Rosetta). Here they hired temporary lodgings. But in correspondence with Salt who was after all the British Consul, he was advised to remain in Egypt and to press charges against the French for the attack.

The legalities were long and boring. While he was waiting, he couldn't sit still, so he decided to fill in the time with another little bit of exploring.

The Search for the Temple of Jupiter Ammon

He decided to explore the oases of the Western Desert and the Faiyum, that great oasis just to the west of Cairo and fed by the Nile. Possible things to be found included the Labyrinth, famed in antiquity for its size and complexity, and the Temple of Jupiter Ammon in the Siwa Oasis, where Alexander the Great was told he would rule the world.

This trip was not to see the success of Belzoni's previous ones. He saw lots of different ruins along the way but failed to identify any of them, walked right over the Labyrinth without seeing it (as did everyone else, to be fair), and ended up in a western oasis which he knew wasn't the Siwa Oasis but claiming in his later book that he had in fact reached the Siwa Oasis. Not the most auspicious ending to Belzoni's career in Egypt.

When he return to civilisation, he found the lawyers still arguing about admissability of evidence, what court the accused could be tried under and so on. It was obviously going nowhere. Belzoni gave up. He said goodbye to Egypt for ever.

A Quick Stop In Italy

Belzoni and Sarah went from Egypt direct to Italy, arriving in Venice some time in November 1819, and proceeding to Padua just before Christmas. Here he met his family for the first time in 17 years. He introduced Sarah to them all. His father and his youngest brother, Antonio, had both died. Belzoni presented his family with a pair of gazelles!

Before he arrived, he had sent on two statues of Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess, to the local council, asking them to put them on display in the museum. Now the city welcomed back a son they had, indeed, forgotten - the great explorer returned - and gave him a civic reception.

Then it was time to go again. Business in London was pressing. He never returned to Padua.

Belzoni in London

In March 1820, Belzoni and Sarah reached London. His first task was to write a book of all his travels and adventures. He had kept copious notes and a detailed journal of all his time in Egypt. He wrote the book based on these notes, refusing all offers by editors and publishers to tidy it up, so there are some places where it is far from clear what he is saying. The book was called 'Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia'. There was also an appendix by Sarah entitled 'Mrs Belzoni's Trivial Account of the Women of Egypt, Nubia and Syria¹⁰'. The book was published in December 1820, and was a great success. It was immediately translated professionally into French. Belzoni was so pleased with the French version (which had certain things tidied up and toned down), that he decided the Italian version should be translated from the French one.

London Society was a busy schedule of dinners and parties, and Belzoni was the sensation of the month, being invited to all the popular ones. It was here he met Sir Walter Scott. But Belzoni didn't really fit into the scene - this giant who had haggled with Arabs, who had seen sights never before seen and who had worked in temperatures closer to boiling than freezing was out of place here. Eventually he turned down the invitations and got to work on his exhibition.

He looked around for a suitable place to put on his exhibition. Lo and behold, in the middle of Piccadilly, there was the Egyptian Hall, whose facade had been done up like an Egyptian temple, although it was somewhat a mish-mash of different styles. He spent the whole of the spring of 1821 making plaster casts from the wax moulds, and painting them to match the reproductions made by Ricci. He decided to show only two rooms of the Tomb at full scale, but he did display all Ricci's paintings, which were at 1:6 scale. He also made models of the Temple of Abu Simbel (1:30 scale), the portico of the Temple of Isis in Philae, and the Pyramid of Khafre (1:120 scale). The Tomb of Seti was advertised as the 'Tomb of Psammis' because of a misinterpretation of the hieroglyphs by Dr Thomas Young, who mistakenly thought he had deciphered them. The exhibition was a resounding success - it was just the sort of thing the masses of London were looking for. Unfortunately, the British Museum did not seem interested, and when Belzoni offered to sell them the models, they turned him down. He eventually auctioned them to the highest bidder.

Belzoni the Explorer

Belzoni was not the sort who could settle in London. He was content to live there for a while, so that his exhibition could make him some money, which it did, but he needed adventure. He quickly set his sights on solving the problem of the Niger River.

It was known that if you headed north from the south coast of West Africa, you would reach a mighty river, the Niger, which flowed northwards. This then turned east and flowed into the fabled city of Timbuktu, but after that its course was unknown. Various theories had been put forward, such as that it flowed into a giant salt pan and evaporated¹¹, or that it became a tributary of the Nile. We now now that it turns south and splits into thousands of 'distributaries', each reaching the sea separately. Timbuktu itself was a mysterious city - at the southern point of the only route across the Sahara, and guarded by the Arabs for centuries from foreigners, it had become in the minds of Europeans a place of fabulous riches where the houses were roofed with gold. Belzoni's friend Burckhardt had always wanted to make the trip to Timbuktu but had died before the opportunity became available. Now Belzoni had the time and the funds to make the journey himself and to put his name in the history books as a great explorer.

Sadly, it was not to be. He sank virtually all his cash into the expedition, but everything seemed to go wrong. His intended route to Timbuktu was from Morocco, but the government there wouldn't let him into the country. He ended up on the south coast of West Africa many months later, starting at the Benin River at the end of 1823. On 24 November, he reached the Kingdom of Benin. On 25 November, he was struck down by dysentery. On 3 December, he was dead. He was buried under an arasma tree in the town of Guato. A wooden tablet was placed on the grave. Nearly 40 years later, the explorer Richard Burton visited the spot. The locals could still remember the giant who had passed through so briefly, and were able to point out the tree under which he was buried, but there was no trace of the grave.

Aftermath

Belzoni's collection of antiquities ended up in the British Museum, but with Salt's name as the donor. There was an argument over the value of the alabaster coffin of Seti I, and the museum wouldn't take it, so it was bought by Sir John Soane and ended up in his curious house, now a museum, in Lincoln Fields, London. Sarah tried to put on the Tomb Exhibition again in London and Paris, but it made a loss. She became destitute, and petitioned for many years for a state pension in honour of the work her husband had done for Britain. She eventually received it when she was 70. Belzoni's Italian family got very little - in light of the adventurer's fame, his mother received a small pension from the city of Padua, but it appears that she died the following year.

The days of the mass looting of Egypt were now nearly over. A new generation of Egyptologists entered the scene. Armed with the ability to read the hieroglyphs due to Champollion's discoveries, they could now reconstruct the history of Egypt. Men like Auguste Mariette (1821–1881) and Sir William Flinders Petrie (1852–1942) became the new heroes of archaeology. But Belzoni's name must stand as one of the greatest of the pioneers.