Giovanni Battista Belzoni

Giovanni Battista Belzoni (born Nov. 5, 1778, Padua, Republic of Venice—died Dec. 3, 1823, Gwato, Benin) was an excavator of Egyptian archaeological sites.

Originally planning to join a religious order, Belzoni went to England in 1803 where he turned his powerful six-foot seven-inch physique to earning a living as a circus strong man. He also exhibited models of hydraulic engines and in 1815 he went to Cairo to offer to Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, hydraulic engines for use in irrigation. Two years later he had embarked on a new career, excavating Egyptian tombs and temples for their treasures with scant regard for incidental damage to less desirable items. Many of his archaeological feats might today be regarded as pillage.

At Thebes he obtained the colossal sculpture of the head of Ramses II (“the Young Memnon”) for the British Museum; in the nearby Valley of the Tombs of Kings, he discovered the tomb of Seti I and removed the aragonite sarcophagus for the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Though he managed to make off with an obelisk from the Nile island of Philae (Jazīrat Fīlah), near Aswān, it was taken from him at gunpoint by agents working for French interests. He explored Elephantine (Jazīrat Aswān) and the temple of Edfu (Idfu), cleared the entrance to the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, was first to penetrate the pyramid of Khafre at Giza, and identified the ruins of the city of Berenice on the Red Sea. He returned to England in 1819 and published an account of his adventures, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia . . . , 2 vol. (1820). He died in western Africa as he began a journey to Timbuktu. In 1825 his widow exhibited in Paris and London his drawings and models of the royal tombs of Thebes. Great Belzoni, a biography written by Stanley Mayes, appeared in 1959.