Beneath the Sands of Egypt

by Donald P. Ryan, PhD

  My next stop was London, where I confronted the author of the original article. In an incredible blanket of bluff, his response was that the headline about “ancient Egypt’s lost queen being found” could be construed in any number of different ways other than how I had chosen to interpret it. It soon became apparent that I would only be wasting my time waiting for any sort of retraction or apology.

  I worried for months that I wouldn’t be allowed to work in Egypt again, but, happily, all was well. And I would return again to the valley more than once. As for the mysterious woman resting in a pine box in Tomb 60, her “curse” was short-lived, and it would be more than another decade before much of her story would be credibly sorted out.

  EIGHT

  IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE GIANT

  AS IMPROBABLE AS IT MIGHT SEEM, one of the great pioneers of Egyptology, if not archaeology in general, was a carnival performer, essentially a circus strongman who through unusual circumstances arrived in Egypt in 1815 and after four years of incredible adventures left his mark. His name was Giovanni Battista Belzoni, and our lives would intersect in the Valley of the Kings, where his presence is still felt. He was the first Westerner to excavate there, discovering several tombs, including a certain KV 21, a large undecorated tomb containing the mummies of two women.

  The story of Belzoni is curious indeed. Born in Padua, Italy, in 1778, the son of a barber, Belzoni grew up to be extraordinarily large—some say as tall as seven feet, but more likely six foot seven or so—and of considerable bulk and possessing amazing strength. An encounter with such a veritable giant in his day was no doubt notable, whether in the streets of Venice, or London, or Cairo.

  Detailed knowledge of Belzoni’s early life and education are a bit sketchy, but we know that around 1803 he left Italy with his brother, Francesco, to seek his fortune elsewhere than in the midst of the havoc of the Napoleonic Wars. England, isolated as it was from the European mainland, appeared to offer a safe respite, and Belzoni quickly gained employment at a theater in London, playing extra-large characters and eventually perfecting the strongman act that would keep him traveling to fairs and other entertainment venues for many years. Billed exotically as “the Patagonian Sampson,” Belzoni, dressed in feathers and a tunic, or tights, could dazzle a crowd. A highlight of his act was placing a frame on his sturdy shoulders upon which up to eleven members of the audience were invited to climb aboard. The weight seemed to leave the giant sufficiently unencumbered for him to amble about the stage, nonchalantly waving flags in each hand. His wife, Sarah, and his assistant, James, facilitated the act and might have assured that only smaller and lighter participants made it to the stage for lifting.

  Along with his feats of strength, Belzoni also distinguished himself as a well-rounded entertainer, adept at playing the musical water glasses, performing dramatic magic tricks, and orchestrating colorful fountain displays. One can imagine this gentle giant striking the little glasses with spoons while sprays of water erupted in time to a melody.

  It was actually Belzoni’s interest in hydraulics that brought him to Egypt. While traveling with his act away from his adopted home of England, he encountered an agent representing Muhammad Ali, the pasha of Egypt, who was seeking technology and innovations to modernize his country. Convinced that he had the design for a new kind of waterwheel that would revolutionize irrigation, Belzoni took a chance and set out for Egypt in 1815, with Sarah and James in tow.

  The Egypt that met the threesome was an unfamiliar world, and although Belzoni’s invention was apparently effective, it was ultimately rejected, leaving the strongman from Padua stranded and unemployed in a very strange land. While in Cairo, Belzoni met one of the great explorers of the Middle East, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt. Hailing from Switzerland, Burckhardt had distinguished himself by traveling far and wide in the Islamic world, where few Europeans of his day dared tread. Adept in Arabic language and customs, and traveling in local dress, he even visited the sacred city of Mecca incognito to observe what few outside Islam had seen. Today he is perhaps best remembered as the one who discovered the ancient city of Petra in what is now southern Jordan, immortalized by the poet John Burgon as “the rose-red city, half as old as time.”

  Burckhardt had recently paid a visit to southern Egypt, and even farther south into Nubia, and Belzoni was dazzled by stories of immense temples buried in sand, colossal statues of ancient kings, and a seemingly endless stream of antiquities, neglected and ripe for exploration, if not for the taking. A friend of Burckhardt’s who had a notion for collecting choice antiquities for his homeland, the British consul in Egypt Henry Salt, commissioned Belzoni to travel south up the Nile to the area of ancient Thebes, modern-day Luxor, where in the midst of the ruins of a temple he would find a huge stone head and torso, remnants of the seated statue of a once-great pharaoh. The beautiful quality of workmanship and its benevolent face would make a fine addition to the growing collection of London’s British Museum.

  With a permit from the pasha to secure the bust, Belzoni enthusiastically set out to retrieve it, a frustrating task that would introduce him to many of the cultural and technical dynamics of working in a place like early-nineteenth-century Egypt. Belzoni found the head as Burckhardt had described it, in a monument we now know as the mortuary temple of Rameses II. It lay faceup and, in Belzoni’s own words, “smiling on me, at the thought of being taken to England.” With great difficulty, and after weeks of effort, especially in terms of the suspicion and obstinacy he met with on the part of the local officials and workmen, Belzoni was successful in removing the bust from the temple compound and inched it on rollers to the banks of the Nile, where it would be loaded aboard a boat for the trip northward. A number of months later, the statue arrived in England, where ever since it has remained a prized feature of the British Museum’s collection of Egyptian stone sculpture.

  After this first success in 1816, Belzoni maintained a remarkable career in Egypt over the next three years, as both an explorer and collector of antiquities. He traveled far south into Nubia to investigate the magnificent temples built by Rameses II into mountainsides at Abu Simbel, discovered the entrance of the pyramid of Chephren at Giza, and made major journeys of exploration on the Red Sea coast and into the Fayyum and the Western Desert. In the process he collected an extensive array of antiquities, including a huge obelisk, which like almost everything else was eventually shipped to Britain. Most important for my interests, Belzoni was the first to excavate in the Valley of the Kings.

  His initial efforts there resulted in the discovery of the royal tomb of Aye, the successor of Tutankhamun. Later he would return and find five more tombs, including that of Rameses I, Montuhirkhopeshef (whose entranceway was anciently carved over the top of KV 60), and the huge and beautifully decorated tomb of Seti I, the father of Rameses II and an impressive pharaoh himself. The last of these contained a stunning, nearly translucent inscribed sarcophagus of alabaster, and Belzoni and an Italian artist documented much of the tomb in beautiful watercolors.

  Belzoni wasn’t the only European collecting antiquities for museums back home. The competition was often fierce and hostile, and there were some who laid claim to his accomplishments, sweeping him aside and taking credit for his ingenuity. Eventually Belzoni grew weary of the increasing threats and antics of his rivals, and he left Egypt for Italy in 1819, then returned to England in 1820. There he wrote a memoir of his travels under the ponderous but descriptive title Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia: And of a Journey to the Coast of the Red Sea, in Search of the Ancient Berenice; and Another to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon. The book was a bestseller, and it went through three editions as well as being published in French, German, and Italian. It was also accompanied by a volume of lovely hand-colored plates that beautifully illustrated what Belzoni ably described.

  With his acumen as a showman, he opened a popular exhibition of Egyptian antiquities in London i
n 1821, with all the status of a celebrity. Much to his embarrassment, he would occasionally be recognized as the remarkable “Patagonian Sampson” of not so many years previous, but Belzoni had refashioned his life; he was now Belzoni, the explorer and antiquarian.

  Within a few years of urban life, Belzoni’s urge/need for exploration and adventure became overwhelming. No doubt inspired by his old friend Johann Burckhardt, Belzoni set out in quest of one of the great goals of early-nineteenth-century exploration: the search for the legendary African city of Timbuktu. In 1823 he first made an unsuccessful attempt by land. His second try was by sea, and he arrived by boat at the mouth of a tributary of the Niger River on the continent’s west coast. Belzoni trekked inland and soon became ill. Within two weeks he was dead of dysentery, a common fate for many other would-be explorers in this part of the world.

  Belzoni’s widow, Sarah, grieved greatly and commissioned an amazing memorial lithograph of her husband. The drawing features a handsome portrait of Giovanni in European dress at its center, surrounded by many of his greatest Egyptian discoveries, including the bust of Rameses II, an obelisk, the sarcophagus of Seti I, and the Chephren Pyramid. It is a rare and touching tribute, and Belzoni would not be easily forgotten. His exploits became legendary and were repeated in print, including a chapter in The Book of Gallant Vagabonds and as the subject of a children’s book entitled Fruits of Enterprise. Within the pages of the latter, stories of Belzoni are told by a mother to her children, who are duly impressed by the explorer’s persistence and strength of character. Even Richard Burton, one of the greatest explorers of the nineteenth century, sought out Belzoni’s simple grave when he led his own journey into Benin in 1868.

  My first encounter with Belzoni was probably through the pages of National Geographic magazine, where his role in the exploration of the temples of Abu Simbel was well noted in an article written about the salvage of those monuments from the rising waters behind the Aswan Dam in the early 1960s. A real interest arose, however, through the unsuspecting pages of a book titled The Rape of the Nile by archaeologist Brian Fagan. In this book, which aims to chronicle the abuses of Egypt’s past by many of its early visitors, a whole section is dedicated to Belzoni under the title “The Greatest Plunderer of Them All.” The book offers very little objective assessment, basically paraphrasing Belzoni’s own published work and then passing harsh judgment on the man and his activities from the smug and comfortable armchair of the late twentieth century.

  Rather than inspiring a sense of dismay and disgust, Fagan’s book had the opposite effect on me. I found Belzoni to be an utterly fascinating character. My own father possessed a love of the circus and the “variety arts,” which he passed on to me, and thus I saw Belzoni, at least in his early career, as a kindred spirit. As I read further, it became clear that the reputation of Belzoni as a “rapist of the Nile” was widespread, although with some prominent exceptions. The definitive biography, The Great Belzoni by Stanley Mayes, offered a detailed and sympathetic portrait of an amazingly clever, bold, resourceful, and very sensitive man with a genuine sense of showmanship and an authentic spirit of exploration. This is the Belzoni I hoped to find, and my own additional research into the topic verified my suspicion: Not only was Belzoni not the grand butcher of Egypt’s past, he can be demonstrably shown to have possessed a sophistication well ahead of his time.

  Reading Belzoni’s own published comments in the only book he wrote, one can be struck by the detail he offers, including the laborious prose enumerating the dimensions of this chamber or that. And then there are the plates accompanying his Narrative book, which includes, especially notable for my interests, a topographical map of the Valley of the Kings, showing the valley from above and noting its subterranean features, certainly brilliant for its day. Likewise, his cross-section drawing of Seti’s immense tomb, complete with a scale of measurement, surely demonstrates Belzoni’s accomplishment of a degree of archaeological documentation that was rare, if not unique, in his day. And this stuff is all published, for those who care to look.

  Not only did Belzoni show a precocious interest in archaeological documentation, but he possessed a mature interest in a wider range of antiquities, remarkable for his time. While most of his peers concentrated on the collection of stone statuary and decorated objects like coffins and such, Belzoni had an appreciation for some of the more ordinary remnants of the Egyptian past. A catalog of objects from his exhibition reveals that he retained such objects as that piece of ancient rope found in the tomb of Seti I and an ancient pair of sandals. What they lacked in glory, they made up for by relating the Egyptians of old to the common humanity of daily life.

  But, alas, the image of a giant-size carnival performer coming to Egypt and carting away giant-size treasures from Egypt’s past is almost too good a symbol to represent the excesses of the nineteenth-century exploitation of pharaonic antiquity. Belzoni became the all-purpose poster boy for everything that was retrospectively shameful and abusive.

  Did Belzoni’s methods conform to our own? No, nor can we expect them to have. Was he more archaeologically astute when compared to his peers? There is no question that he was. Should we cry over the spilled milk of the early nineteenth century, regretting that we could do so much better today? Cry if you like, but what happened happened, and archaeologists today can only hope that their own work won’t be as harshly judged by future scholars wielding ways and means perhaps far more sophisticated than we can yet imagine.

  If I harbored any doubts about Belzoni’s capabilities in the back of my mind, they were quickly dismissed when I examined some of his materials kept in the archives of the Bristol Museum in England. Among the museum’s collections are some of the original paintings of scenes from the tomb of Seti I that Belzoni presented in his exhibitions. Among this material was a water-color that had never been published nor commented upon. On this sheet of paper is Belzoni’s own imaginative drawing of the great temple of Abu Simbel, a cross section through the mountain of the temple and its chambers, complete with scale. It was a clincher for me and a clear demonstration of Belzoni’s underappreciated brilliance.

  I was once invited to Padua, Italy, to speak to a local group of amateur and professional historians known as the Amici di Belzoni (Friends of Belzoni). Well over two hundred years since his birth in 1778, Belzoni is still considered a proud citizen of the city, and the Amici were eager to hear about their native son as well as my work in the valley. Working through a translator, I presented a lecture that was enthusiastically received, and the hospitality surrounding my visit was impressive. I was taken to the great man’s birthplace and shown memorabilia relating to his life and travels. At the end of my talk, I opened the floor to the audience and was asked the awkward question, “So, do Americans love Belzoni, too?” The sincere questioner was no doubt expecting an answer in the positive—after all, who couldn’t fail to love Padua’s hometown boy made good? I didn’t have the heart to say that most Americans had probably never heard of him and that those who had probably looked at him as an infamous looter. All I could mutter was something to the effect of, “Not everybody understands him.”

  My opinion of Belzoni is not universally appreciated. On more than one occasion, I’ve experienced incredibly angry reactions at the very mention of his name, although I’ve noticed a softening of judgment in recent years. Belzoni was certainly a man of his times, but when placed next to a qualitative yardstick against his peers, he stands tall, exercising an astounding degree of archaeological insight in a time when there were no real standards for such.

  My own interest in developing a project in the Valley of the Kings was partially inspired by one of Belzoni’s discoveries there, a tomb now referred to as KV 21. The tomb was one of those whose entrances were invisible when I did my impromptu survey of the valley in 1983. Consulting his Narrative, I found the description of the tomb to be both enchanting and provocative:

  On the same day [October 6, 1817] we perceived some marks of an
other tomb in an excavation, that had been begun three days before, precisely in the same direction as the first tomb, and not a hundred yards from it…. This is more extensive, but entirely new, and without a single painting in it: it had been searched by the ancients, as we perceived at the end of the first passage a brick wall, which stopped the entrance, and had been forced through. After passing this brick wall you descend a staircase, and proceed through another corridor, at the end of which is the entrance to a pretty large chamber, with a single pillar in the centre, and not plastered in any part. At one corner of this chamber we found two mummies on the ground quite naked, without cloth or case. They were females, and their hair pretty long, and well preserved, though it was easily separated from the head by pulling it a little. At one side of this room is a small door, leading into a small chamber, in which we found the fragments of several earthen vessels, and also pieces of vases of alabaster, but so decayed that we could not join one to another. On the top of the staircase we found an earthen jar quite perfect, with a few hieroglyphics on it, and large enough to contain two buckets of water. This tomb is a hundred feet from the entrance to the end of the chamber, twenty feet deep, and twenty-three wide. The smaller chamber is ten feet square: it faces the east by south, and runs straight towards west by north.

  Belzoni’s published plates, too, show an accurate cross section of the tomb, complete with scale.