Tomb raider: the great Giovanni Belzoni

Then, inside a high-vaulted chamber, Belzoni identified the tomb’s most splendid treasure: a sarcophagus cut from a single piece of alabaster. The delicate-looking, translucent shell measured almost three metres long and had hundreds of intricately carved figures on its sides, which could be illuminated by a torch inside. Even that the lid had been broken and its occupant removed, the result of an ancient robbery, failed to spoil this most “beautiful and invaluable” artefact.

Pyramid man

It is 200 years since Belzoni discovered the tomb of Seti I on 17 October 1817, and the Pharaoh’s unique sarcophagus. And while he is remembered for this find, plus a long list of other achievements in Egypt, there is no questioning that Belzoni’s path to becoming an archaeologist, and his methods in collecting antiquities, were hardly typical.

Only a few years earlier, he was in the theatre halls and fairs of Britain making a modest living as a travelling strongman. A giant of the time at an alleged 6ft 7in, the Padua-born son of a barber spent nearly a decade performing under the names ‘Patagonian Sampson’ or ‘Great Belzoni’. His speciality – referred to, appropriately enough, as the human pyramid – involved wearing an iron frame harness fitted with wooden benches, on which he could supposedly lift 12 punters before pacing the stage waving flags.

Going to Egypt only came about thanks to a chance meeting. In 1815, Belzoni, approaching 40, and his equally daring wife Sarah, set their sights on the theatrical stages of Constantinople. In Malta, however, they met an emissary of the most powerful man in Egypt, the pasha Muhammad Ali, who sought new technologies to modernise the country, particularly irrigation of the Nile. This caught Belzoni’s attention. Smart, ambitious and fostering an amateur interest in water hydraulics since his youth in Rome, he enjoyed the idea of leaving his circus strongman days behind him and giving engineering a go.

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That career did not last long, though. Belzoni arrived in Cairo to demonstrate his water wheel design, which worked efficiently enough, but the pasha rejected his idea. Left penniless and unemployed, he accepted he needed to think again. Helped by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt – who befriended Belzoni with tales of his exploits, such as disguising as a Muslim in Mecca – he found an opportunity with the recently installed British consul-general, Henry Salt.

Salt looked to make his fortune selling antiquities to the British Museum. Ancient Egypt had become something of a boom industry since Napoleon’s campaign in the country in 1798-99, so to satisfy the growing fashion for artefacts in Europe, collectors sifted through the sands for statues, carvings and anything else that they could move.

Having believed he could make his name building the country’s future, Belzoni would seek glory by digging up Egypt’s past

One item Salt eyed greedily was the ‘Younger Memnon’, a 2.7-metre carved granite upper body of Ramesses II. Lying in the ruins of a mortuary temple at Thebes, the face remained so well preserved that, despite being separated from the body, the statue made a highly desirable prize. But it weighed between seven and eight tons. Moving something so heavy had defeated earlier French collectors (a hole in the right shoulder reveals how they planned to use dynamite to separate the face from the torso to make it lighter).

Belzoni had less claim as an expert of ancient objects than he did water engineering, yet he convinced Salt he could move the statue five miles over land to the Nile, ready to sail to London. Having believed he could make his name building the country’s future, Belzoni would seek glory by digging up Egypt’s past.

Amateur archaeology

On 30 June 1816, Belzoni and Sarah embarked on the 300-mile journey to Thebes, over the river from modern-day Luxor. They had little money, so hired a cheap boat and only brought rope and timber as equipment. When they arrived at Ramesses II’s temple, the sight left them in awe. “It appeared to me like entering a city of giants who after a long conflict were all destroyed, leaving ruins of their various temples as the only proof of their former existence,” wrote Belzoni.

Once he identified the Younger Memnon – “With its face turned upwards, and apparently smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England,” – he began the colossal task. Belzoni not only raced against time to reach the Nile before the flood season, but his efforts to employ locals were hampered by a man working for the French, who would become his chief rival throughout his time in Egypt: Bernardino Drovetti. To get the 80 men he needed, Belzoni resorted to bribes and threats, putting his muscular physique to good use. “In this country,” he declared, “respect is paid only to the strongest.”

With the statue eventually levered onto a wooden sledge, the slow and backbreaking process of dragging it along rollers got underway on 7 July. Some days, they moved only a few metres. The workers chanted as they pulled – it being Ramadan, they could not eat until the Sun went down – Belzoni yelled commands and Sarah followed. Like many of his contemporaries, Belzoni showed an unfortunate disregard for antiquities not deemed of interest, notably ordering the bases of two columns blocking his path to be ripped down. Yet after weeks of exhausting labour, Belzoni and his statue arrived on the banks of the Nile on 12 August.

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Belzoni succeeded where everyone else had failed, and he wanted more. Rather than wait for a boat large enough to load the statue, he explored the Valley of the Kings – the burial site of pharaohs – and sailed south into Nubia to build a collection. Belzoni and Sarah snaked their way along the Nile and bartered coffee, tobacco and beads with locals, as they hunted treasures at the ancient temples and monuments on the river banks.

A local chief once asked Belzoni: “Have you a scarcity of stones in Europe that you come here to fetch them away?” He replied that Europe had plenty, but Egypt’s were of a better sort. At the ruins on the island of Philae, he took possession of 16 blocks that form a decorated wall, although he then had them cut smaller to make them easier to carry.

The Belzonis' final destination was Abu Simbel, where Ramesses II had cut two temples into the mountainside on the west bank. The smaller, built to honour his consort Nefertari, could still be seen, while the four 21-metre statues in front of the Great Temple had nearly disappeared. Belzoni, having heard of his friend Burckhardt’s visit in 1813, longed to see if he could find the entrance, but he compared removing the mountain of sand to “making a hole in water”. With nowhere near enough time, money, supplies or labour, they returned to Thebes.

Above the salt

By the time Belzoni returned to Cairo, he had amassed an impressive collection of statues from the Karnak temples and the Younger Memnon, for which Salt paid £100. Salt also agreed to a second expedition, but that did not mean the two worked well together. They each had different ideas of their relationship – while Salt always considered Belzoni to be in his private employ, Belzoni believed he acted on behalf of the British Museum. He grew increasingly concerned that his involvement would not receive full credit.

This made him more determined to collect as many antiquities as he could and ensure the world knew who found them. Belzoni, leaving Sarah in Cairo, departed for Thebes in February 1817, only to learn that Drovetti had secured firmans (permissions) to dig. He later had some of his finds vandalised by French agents. By focusing on tombs instead, Belzoni sought out canopic jars, amulets and profitable shreds of papyri, but also destroyed countless mummies by carelessly stepping, and once sitting, on them. He wrote of an examination of two female mummies: “Their hair pretty long and well preserved, though it was easily separated from the head by pulling it a little.”

Belzoni, by now wearing Turkish dress and growing his beard long, continued to Philae to wait for Sarah. By the time she arrived, he had invited two Royal Navy officers to join his excavation of Abu Simbel, which already included Salt’s secretary Henry Beechey and a Greek collector nicknamed Yanni. The boat had no more room, so to long-suffering Sarah’s “great mortification”, Belzoni sailed away without her. Not to be out undone, she went on her own adventure to the Holy Land – and snuck into a mosque.

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Back at Abu Simbel on 29 June, Belzoni resumed his search for the way into the temple. Over a month of digging – during which provisions ran low and the local help stopped showing up, leaving Belzoni and his small team to carry on themselves – they cleared much of the sand off the giant statues. Then, on 1 August, the call went up that an opening had been discovered. Waiting until the next morning to let the 3,000-year-old air clear, they first saw the wonders of Abu Simbel’s halls and mighty statues in the early-morning sunshine. Yet Belzoni, not knowing how iconic this place would become, perhaps felt a twinge of disappointment. The temple contained few treasures to take away, let alone rooms of gold (as some of the legends had claimed). They stayed in the sweltering heat long enough to record details from the temple and carve their names in the wall.

Belzoni’s next landmark discovery came within a couple of months. Drovetti still controlled excavations in Thebes, so Belzoni pushed deeper into the Valley of the Kings, where he had an uncanny ability to locate lost tombs (four in 12 days, by one account). That did not leave much time for taking due care – once using a battering ram to break down an outer wall.

“A fortunate day, one of the best perhaps of my life,” was how Belzoni described 17 October 1817, the day he opened the magnificent tomb of Seti I. The alabaster sarcophagus alone constituted a career-defining haul, but Belzoni further uncovered hundreds of wooden shabti figures (which act as servants in the afterlife) and even the remains of an embalmed bull.

It would not be a Belzoni discovery, however, without a few blunders. One corridor could not be explored due to being blocked by bat dung and, more egregiously, Belzoni severely dulled the fresh-looking paintwork by taking wax impressions of the walls. A flash flood would later cause substantial damage inside, but the longest tomb of the Valley of the Kings, at 136 metres, is still remembered as
‘Belzoni’s Tomb’.

Still, Belzoni wanted to do more. He carried out “a little private business” in Giza, which actually meant becoming the first man in millennia to open the entrance to the second pyramid and explore the burial chambers. He initially kept it quiet out of ongoing fears that Salt claimed credit for everything he did.

Then – tired with the scandals and petty rivalries that plagued him along the Nile, thanks to Drovetti – Belzoni looked to the deserts on either side. His 40-day expedition in 1818 successfully identified the ruins of the Greco-Roman port of Berenice on the Red Sea. It became a shambles, though, as they forgot to bring spades, so the only digging could be done by a young boy with a large seashell. For his final adventure in Egypt, in April 1819, Belzoni set off west in search of the legendary Siwa Oasis, where Alexander the Great had supposedly visited. He went to the wrong place.

From here to Timbuktu

Belzoni and Sarah left Egypt in September, following the path of his beloved treasures back to England. Unsurprisingly, given his concerns over Salt and conflicts with Drovetti, Belzoni had barely settled before his focus turned to establishing the legacy he wanted. By 1820, he had already written and published a hugely popular, if hastily put together, account of his travels in Egypt.

Following this came an exhibition of his work, complete with facsimiles of chambers from Seti’s tomb, models of Abu Simbel and a host of the finest statues and artefacts. In a publicity move, Belzoni unwrapped a mummy in front of an audience of doctors. The exhibition was a sensation, with some 1,900 visitors paying half a crown to get into the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly on the first day in May 1821. The handsome, colourful Belzoni briefly became a favourite among the social elite of London and also Russia, where he went to meet Tsar Alexander I.

He could lift 12 punters before pacing the stage waving flags

When the spectacle inevitably ended, the Great Belzoni felt the pull of another expedition – to trace the source of the Niger River in West Africa on his way to Timbuktu. It had been the unfulfilled desire of his much-respected friend Burckhardt, who had died, unknown to Belzoni, the day before the discovery of Seti’s tomb. Belzoni only made it as far as Benin before he caught dysentery and died, aged 45, on 3 December 1823.

Belzoni went from circus strongman to plundering Egyptologist, who brought a wealth of treasures back to the surface – just not all in one piece.