Rob Hardy
January 28, 2012
January 28, 2012
28 January - Quick, name an Egyptologist.
For me, the only name I could think of was Howard Carter, who made the
sensational King Tutankhamen finds. Because of a witty and instructive current
biography, though, there's now another whose name I am glad to know. Belzoni:
The Giant Archeologists Love to Hate (University of Virginia Press) is by
Ivor Noël Hume, who is himself an archeologist. Hume has books about his own work
in more recent archeology, and was the director of Colonial Williamsburg's
research program, but he has valuable insider's insights on the work of the
almost-forgotten Giovanni Belzoni, who was among the first to bring back
treasures from Egypt in the wild days when museums and collectors were glad to
get statues and mummy cases and didn't mind that their acquisition came from
some sort of smash-and-grab operation. So archeologists do "love to
hate" Belzoni, although he cannot be faulted for not having a modern idea
of professional propriety. And he was literally a giant, six and a half feet
tall at a time when such heights were rarities. How an Italian commoner came to
be digging around the Nile for Britain proves to be a lively tale.
Belzoni was born in 1778, one of fourteen
children sired by his father, a barber in Padua, Italy. He and his brothers all
worked in the barbershop, but Belzoni wanted something more. His father was
reluctant to let him go, but at age sixteen he was off to Rome to study hydraulics,
although no one knows how he got an interest in such a subject. He was bright
and good with his hands, but as he wandered through Napoleonic Europe, he
didn't find that there was much call for a hydraulics engineer who spoke
Italian. He wound up seeking such work in London, but no one wanted his
services there, either. There was no work to be found except using his height
and strength in the fairs and circuses as the "Patagonian Sampson."
In his act, among other feats, he would carry twelve lesser mortals around the
stage. He did well enough in this role that he could call some of his own
shots, expanding into conjuring and playing the musical glasses. It was also
during this time that he met his wife Sarah. Sarah may have been a tightrope
walker; there are many gaps in her history and in Belzoni's (his memoir made no
mention of his days as a showman). She helped polish his act, and when he had
his career change in Egypt, she was a resourceful helpmeet, artist, and writer.
Belzoni had a short life, and Sarah had a long widowhood during which she
attempted to keep up the world's fading recognition of the husband to whom she
seems to have been devoted.
