The unusual life of a tomb robber
By Alida Becker |
December 2, 2011, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
HIS introduction to the wonders of the ancient world could hardly have been less auspicious. While in Cairo in the summer of 1815, awaiting an audience with Mohammed Ali Pasha, Turkish viceroy of Egypt, the Italian monk-turned-peddler-turned-hydrologist-turned-circus-impresario Giovanni Belzoni paid a visit to the Great Pyramid and became so tightly wedged in one of its internal passages that his guides had to forcibly extract him.
It was merely the first of many indignities endured by this 6-foot-6 "giant," whose adventures in the Nile Valley would yield some of the most imposing treasures in the British Museum. They would also earn him the undying enmity of his successors in a field that only later acquired the polish of a professional discipline - archeology.
While granting that Belzoni may be what a colleague has called "the most notorious tomb robber Egypt has ever known," Ivor Noel Hume, the former director of Colonial Williamsburg's archaeological research program, also admits to a fondness for this indefatigable entrepreneur. And while it's entirely possible to cringe at Belzoni's methods (blasting through walls with battering rams, crunching bones underfoot and squashing mummies when he sat on them, incising his name into ancient statues) it's nearly impossible to resist the story of a life, as Hume puts it in the prologue to "Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate," full of "naivete, ambition, duplicity, avarice and poverty worthy of Charles Dickens or Henry James, differing only in that it happens to be true."
One of four sons born to a barber in Padua, Belzoni escaped army recruitment by entering a Capuchin monastery, then escaped the monastery by becoming a peddler of religious talismans. He wound up in England, hoping to establish himself as a hydraulic engineer. (How he acquired this fascination with waterworks is, Hume explains, just one of his subject's many mysteries.) To support himself in the interim, Belzoni found work in a sideshow and became such a success as the "Patagonian Samson," carrying as many as a dozen "smallish" men around the stage on a steel frame strapped to his waist, that the next decade was spent on the road, incorporating his act into an increasingly flamboyant theatrical show, aided in large part by the acquisition of a very clever, very determined wife who (more mysteries here) may have been Irish and may have been a tightrope walker.
The equally colorful foreign members of the Belzoni saga's supporting cast were led by a textbook villain, Bernardino Drovetti, an Italian-born relic hunter in the employ of the French.
In 1823, Belzoni set off to search for the source of the Nile and died of dysentery in Benin, leaving Sarah, as usual, to cope as best she could.
It was merely the first of many indignities endured by this 6-foot-6 "giant," whose adventures in the Nile Valley would yield some of the most imposing treasures in the British Museum. They would also earn him the undying enmity of his successors in a field that only later acquired the polish of a professional discipline - archeology.
While granting that Belzoni may be what a colleague has called "the most notorious tomb robber Egypt has ever known," Ivor Noel Hume, the former director of Colonial Williamsburg's archaeological research program, also admits to a fondness for this indefatigable entrepreneur. And while it's entirely possible to cringe at Belzoni's methods (blasting through walls with battering rams, crunching bones underfoot and squashing mummies when he sat on them, incising his name into ancient statues) it's nearly impossible to resist the story of a life, as Hume puts it in the prologue to "Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate," full of "naivete, ambition, duplicity, avarice and poverty worthy of Charles Dickens or Henry James, differing only in that it happens to be true."
One of four sons born to a barber in Padua, Belzoni escaped army recruitment by entering a Capuchin monastery, then escaped the monastery by becoming a peddler of religious talismans. He wound up in England, hoping to establish himself as a hydraulic engineer. (How he acquired this fascination with waterworks is, Hume explains, just one of his subject's many mysteries.) To support himself in the interim, Belzoni found work in a sideshow and became such a success as the "Patagonian Samson," carrying as many as a dozen "smallish" men around the stage on a steel frame strapped to his waist, that the next decade was spent on the road, incorporating his act into an increasingly flamboyant theatrical show, aided in large part by the acquisition of a very clever, very determined wife who (more mysteries here) may have been Irish and may have been a tightrope walker.
The equally colorful foreign members of the Belzoni saga's supporting cast were led by a textbook villain, Bernardino Drovetti, an Italian-born relic hunter in the employ of the French.
In 1823, Belzoni set off to search for the source of the Nile and died of dysentery in Benin, leaving Sarah, as usual, to cope as best she could.
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