Giovanni Battista Belzoni

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Giovanni Battista Belzoni

Giovanni Battista Belzoni (born November 15, 1778 in Padua , † December 3, 1823 in Gwato near Benin , Africa ) was an Italian adventurer, engineer , weightlifter and acrobat . He became known as a pioneer of Egyptology .

Life

Giovanni Battista Belzoni was the son of a barber. During his youth in Rome he was particularly interested in hydraulics. The two-meter tall giant should actually have been a clergyman, but when the French under Napoleon Bonaparte took Rome in 1797, he fled the country because of the threat of military service and probably first studied hydraulics in Holland . In 1803 he moved to England , where he worked as a muscle man Samson from Patagonia in the circus " Sadler's Well Theater " due to his tall stature . In the following years he moved with his wife Sarah , who he had married in England, and his servant James Curtain through Great Britain, Portugal and Spain and appeared there not only as the strength man The Great Belzoni , but also as an actor and necromancer, he presented optical illusions and occasionally played the glass harmonica .

The head of the statue of Ramses II from the Ramesseum in Thebes, the so-called "Colossus of Memnon"

In Malta, Belzoni was recruited in 1814 by an envoy from the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali Pasha and in 1815 he traveled to Cairo to offer his invention, a hydraulic irrigation machine, to the Egyptian government. The pasha put him on a salary and Belzoni built a model of his machine with which one ox should do the work of four oxen. In December 1816, a demonstration was scheduled during which sabotage resulted in an accident in which James Curtain was injured. The government then lost interest in the machine.

During his stay he was introduced to the British Consul General Henry Salt through Jean Louis Burckhardt . He commissioned Belzoni to carry out an expedition to Thebes in order to transport the large, about 6-7 ton heavy head of the statue of Ramses II from the local Ramesseum to the British Museum in London. It was this colossal head and its find situation that inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley to write his famous poem Ozymandias . At that time there was a bitter competition for looters in Egypt; especially between Henry Salt and his greatest rival, the French consul Bernardino Drovetti , the Turkish-Egyptian authorities and the Fellachians . On the one hand it was about valuable antiquities that the French wanted for the Louvre and the English for the British Museum, and on the other hand about bribes for the government officials and the highest possible profits for the fellahs. In addition, countless smaller traders and collectors looked for grave treasures, and local groups of robbers also worked with them. Despite numerous intrigues on the part of Drovetti, Belzoni succeeded in carrying out the commission in 1816.

The “irrelevant report” that Belzoni's wife wrote about her contacts with other women during this trip, and that was published in the appendix to Belzoni's Narrative (1820), is of great cultural and historical interest . She was probably the first modern European to get that far into southern Egypt.

Inscription left by Belzoni in the burial chamber of the Khafre pyramid

Later expeditions with Henry Salt took Belzoni to the temples of Edfu , Philae and Elephantine . He exposed the temple of Abu Simbel and the grounds of Karnak . Belzoni returned to Thebes in 1817 and discovered the graves KV17 ( Sethos I ), KV16 ( Ramses I ), WV23 ( Eje ), KV19 ( Montuherchepschef , son of Ramses IX. ), KV21 , WV25 , KV30 and in the Valley of the Kings KV31 . In 1818 Belzoni discovered the entrance of the Chephren pyramid in Giza and penetrated to the burial chamber. Belzoni was also the first European to visit Siwa Oasis , and he found the ruins of Berenike on the Red Sea .

In the summer of 1818, Belzoni and Alessandro Ricci wrote a documentary on KV17 (Belzoni grave) . He left Thebes on January 27, 1819 and returned to England in March 1820. He presented his discoveries in Egypt in the exhibition in the Egyptian Hall on May 1, 1821 in Piccadilly in London. Due to the great interest, the exhibition stayed open for almost a whole year.

In March 1822 he returned to Africa. His wife Sarah accompanied him to Morocco. On a trip to Equatorial Africa he came to Gwato near Benin ( Nigeria ), where he fell ill with dysentery and died on December 3, 1823 at the age of 45. In 1862 Richard Francis Burton was looking for his grave. Only one tree grew on the place where Giovanni Battista Belzoni was buried.

Fonts

  • Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia. London 1820 ( online in Internet Archive )
    • German edition: Belzoni's travels in Egypt and Nubia along with a trip to the shores of the Red Sea and to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon. Bran, Jena 1821
    • New edition: Journeys of discovery in Egypt 1815-1819 in the pyramids, temples and tombs on the Nile. 3rd edition DuMont, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-1326-8 , with a history of trips to Egypt since the 16th century by Ingrid Nowel.
  • Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids temples, tombs and excavations in Egypt and Nubia and to the coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice, and another to the oasis of Jupiter Ammon. Remy, Brussels 1835 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  • Description of the Egyptian Tomb discovered by G. Belzoni , London 1821 ( online ).

literature

  • Constantin von Wurzbach : Belzoni, Johann Baptist . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 01. part. University printing house L. C. Zamarski (formerly JP Sollinger), Vienna 1856, pp. 252-254 ( digitized version ).
  • CW Ceram : Gods, Graves and Scholars. Archeology novel. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1952, pp. 130-134.
  • Colin Clair: Strong man egyptologist. Being the dramatized story of Giovanni Belzoni. Oldbourne, London 1957.
  • Maurice Willson Disher: Pharaoh's fool. Heinemann, London 1957.
  • Stanley Mayes: The great Belzoni. The circus strongman and explorer who recovered Egypt's finest treasures. Putnam, London 1959 (new edition: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, London et al. 2003, ISBN 1-86064-877-0 ).
  • Romain Rainero - Claudio Barocas:  BELZONI, Giovanni Battista. In: Alberto M. Ghisalberti (Ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 8:  Bellucci – Beregan. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1966.
  • Brian M. Fagan : Belzoni the Plunderer. In: Archeology. 26, 1973, ISSN  0003-8113 , pp. 48-51.
  • Luigi Montobbio: Giovanni Battista Belzoni. La vita, i viaggi, le scoperte. Martello, Padua 1984.
  • DP Ryan: A Portrait: Giovanni Battista Belzoni. In: Biblical Archeology. 49, 1986, pp. 133-138.
  • Peter A. Clayton: Belzoni in the British Museum. In: Ancient. A review of antiquity to AD 1650. No. 6, Oct./Nov. 1987, pp. 11-13 (reprint: Agora, Brighton 1987).
  • Dora Jane Hamblin: Behold the Amazing, the Spectacular, Giovanni Belzoni. In: Smithsonian. 19, 1988, ISSN  0037-7333 , pp. 80-88.
  • Brian M. Fagan: Adventure Archeology. Bechtermünz, Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-8289-0666-4 , pp. 46-54.
  • Barbara S. Lesko: Belzoni, Giovanni Baptista. In: Kathryn A. Bard (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Archeology of Ancient Egypt. Routledge, London 1999, ISBN 0-415-18589-0 , pp. 168-169.
  • Joyce Tyldesley : Myth of Egypt. Reclam, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-15-010598-6 , pp. 85-105.

Web links

Commons : Giovanni Battista Belzoni  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tyldesley: Mythos Egypt 2006, pp. 85-88.
  2. ↑ Tyldesley: Mythos Egypt 2006, p. 104 f.
  3. ^ Tyldesley: Mythos Egypt 2006, pp. 88-105.
  4. ^ Mrs. Belzoni's trifling account of the women of Egypt, Nubia, and Syria. In: Belzoni: Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids… London 1820, pp. 441–483.
  5. ^ Richard Francis Burton: Giovanni Battista Belzoni. In: Cornhill Magazine XLII (1880), pp. 36-50.
personal data
SURNAME Belzoni, Giovanni Battista
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian adventurer, weightlifter
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1778
PLACE OF BIRTH Padua
DATE OF DEATH December 3, 1823
Place of death Gwato near Benin , Africa