Reviled by generations of archaeologists as a pillager and plunderer of antiquities (and Schliemann and Woolley weren't???), a new biography of explorer/amateur archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni attempts a balanced view of the man and the times in which he lived.
Review at
The Wall Street Journal
DECEMBER 2, 2011
A Pre-Digital Tomb Raider
Sifting sand, opening crypts, raising fallen statues and
scooping up anything marketable—and transportable—to Britain.
By
GERARD
HELFERICH
In the Egyptian gallery of London's British Museum stands a 3,400-year-old
statue carved from polished black stone. Lifted from the city of Thebes, the
figure depicts Amenhotep III, who ruled Egypt from about 1386 B.C. to 1350 B.C.,
when the kingdom was at the peak of its power and prosperity. Sitting erect but
serene, his hands resting on his thighs, Amenhotep seems every inch the pharaoh.
But one detail disturbs the regal impression: Beside the king's left foot, with
all the subtlety of a Times Square billboard, appears the crudely carved name
"Belzoni." How this Italian commoner came to be forever linked with an Egyptian
pharaoh is now the subject of a lively, witty biography by Ivor Noël Hume.
 |
Belzoni
By Ivor Noël Hume
(University of Virginia Press, 301 pages,
$34.95)
|
Though Giovanni Battista Belzoni is not generally recalled today, he is still
infamous among archaeologists. Born in 1778 in Padua, Italy, Giovanni worked in
his father's barbershop until age 16, then left to study in Rome. After Napoleon
Bonaparte captured the Eternal City in 1797, Belzoni wandered Europe for a time,
ending up in London, where he hoped to secure work as a hydraulic engineer. But
the only job the 6-foot-6 Italian could find was as a circus performer, billed
as "the Patagonian Sampson" and toting a dozen lesser men about the stage.
For more than a decade, Belzoni barnstormed Britain and the Continent, yet
always longed to make his mark in a respectable calling. On the island of Malta
he met an agent of Egypt's ruler Mohammed Ali Pasha, who hired him to design an
irrigation system to distribute the waters of the Nile. With his Irish wife,
Sarah, Belzoni arrived in Alexandria in June 1815. But when his waterworks
failed to impress, the Belzonis found themselves broke and far from home.
Then Giovanni met Henry Salt, England's new consul general to Egypt. Eager to
curry favor with British aristocrats, who coveted the Egyptian antiquities that
Napoleon had made fashionable, Salt hired Belzoni to provide the goods. The
Italian took to the work with the mercenary zeal of a true showman and over the
next three years dashed up and down the Nile, sifting sand, opening tombs,
raising fallen colossi, and scooping up anything transportable and marketable.
Belzoni didn't have the pharaonic fields to himself, however. His great rival
in looting was another Italian, Bernardino Drovetti, the former French consul
general, whose clients included the Louvre museum. Though their competition was
usually limited to dirty tricks and subterfuge, the shenanigans occasionally
flared into something more pointed, as when pistols were drawn over sacking
rights to an obelisk from the island of Philae. (Belzoni prevailed.) To
eliminate any question of ownership, Belzoni and Henry Salt took to incising
their names directly on the relics.
But the collaborators quarreled often and long about expenses, the rights to
the loot and credit for their discoveries. By 1819, Belzoni was fed up; he and
the long-suffering Sarah returned to England. He had excavated the fabulous tomb
of Seti I at Abydos, and in London he hoped to exhibit a reproduction of the
sepulcher. But he failed to pry Seti's sarcophagus away from Salt and the
British Museum, and without that showpiece his exhibit failed to attract the
hoped-for crowds. Belzoni's memoir sold briskly, though, and in London he was
celebrated as an illustrious explorer and even "the Great Belzoni." To his
bitter disappointment, however, his lower-class origin, Italian nativity, circus
experience and patently mercenary attitude meant that he could never be accepted
by English society as a gentleman scholar.
Later generations were even harder on Belzoni. In the 19th century, as
archaeology began to mature into a more rigorous, respectable endeavor, his
smash-and-grab methods were abhorred; he was decried by the president of the
Archaeological Association of America as "the greatest plunderer of them all"
and by a writer for the National Geographic Society as "the most notorious tomb
robber Egypt has ever known."
Biographer Ivor Noël Hume hopes to rehabilitate Belzoni's reputation. The
"Great Explorer," he argues, was no worse than his contemporaries or his
predecessors. The looting of Egyptian tombs and temples was already rife in
ancient Greek times, and the Egyptians themselves were eager accomplices (for a
price) in the sacking of their cultural heritage. Into the 20th century,
tourists could still buy antiquities directly from Cairo's Egyptian Museum.
As for Belzoni, Mr. Hume says, "he was only doing his job." In that
laissez-faire era, "there were no archaeological purists looking over his
shoulder. All that mattered was finding something exciting." If there is blame
to be ascribed, Mr. Hume suggests that it be cast on Belzoni's employer, Henry
Salt, and on Salt's wealthy patrons, who craved Egyptian
objets to
display at their country estates and in the august institutions on whose boards
they sat, especially the British Museum, which purchased many of Belzoni's
discoveries.
Despite Belzoni's unsavory reputation, the author says, he "showed more
serious interest in the context of the tombs and temples" than others of his
time. Mr. Hume, former director of excavations at Jamestown, Va., goes so far as
to argue that Belzoni was "a bona fide archaeologist." Others may find that
claim extreme, since the beginning of Egyptian archaeology is usually traced to
about 1850, when Frenchman Auguste Mariette, the founder of Egypt's first
national museum, began to preach the gospel of conservation. And some may not be
so quick to forgive the desecration of Egypt's patrimony. Still, in this
entertaining and graceful account of Belzoni's adventures, Mr. Hume opens a
window on the raffish days of early Egyptology, when an Italian giant towered
over his competitors.
Mr. Helferich is the author of "Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost
Jade of the Maya," just published by Lyons Press.
