Belzoni
Egypt

Belzoni


Suite 101 (Lito Apostolakou)

If you're interested in the explorer and treasure hunter Belzoni then this new article on the Suite101 website may be of interest.

Giovanni Belzoni, the 19th-century explorer and Egyptian archaeologist, started out on his adventures as a circus strongman.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni, copyright expired

Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered King Tutankhamun's tomb, sums up Belzoni as "one of the most remarkable men in the history of archaeology" (Beese, 1999). Belzoni was a man “of good figure, gentlemanly manners, and great mind” (Thornbury, 1878), a "circus clown" but "of serious and lofty purpose, and imbued with the great desire of bettering the knowledge of the world" (Cooke, 1915).
Early Adventures of Belzoni

Born in 1778 to a barber of Padua, Italy, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, one of fourteen children, has always been of a “truant disposition”, an ardent reader of “Robinson Crusoe” with a “purpose of rambling” (Harpers 1851). As a young boy he travelled with his brother to Ferrara to seek his fortune. This was the first adventure of the 19th-century explorer from which he returned home in a bad state. But at 18 he left again this time for Rome to exercise the profession of his father.

In Rome Belzoni entered the Capuchin order and became a monk. It was there that he studied hydraulics and built an Artesian well for the Capuchins. When Napoleon occupied Rome in 1798, Belzoni escaped to the Netherlands where he earned a living as a barber as the Dutch were not interested in his hydraulic inventions. He did not know that hydraulics would prove useful to becoming an Egyptian archaeologist.


See the above page for more.




- New Book: Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love To Hate
Charlotte Observer (Alan Rauch) Resting in apparent tranquility at uptown's Discovery Place are more than 40 mummies from around the world. Charlotte is one of only a few American destinations for this major exhibit, and the opportunity to see so...

- Book Review: Belzoni - The Giant Archaeologists Love To Hate
New York Times (Alida Becker) 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...

- Tv Review: The Pharoah And The Showman
http://tinyurl.com/v8vmc (smh.com.au) "BBC documentary re-enacts the discovery and resurrection of Egypt's greatest monuments by Giovanni Belzoni, a failed carnival strongman hired to move a large head of Ramses for the British consul. It's a...

- Review: Bbc's Egypt Series
http://tinyurl.com/tuub4 (theage.com.au)"The BBC's Egypt relives the bitter rivalry between Britain and France. . . . The desperate military, political and scholarly competition between the two European powers plays a large role in the six-part dramatised...

- University Returns Artefacts
http://tinyurl.com/nfw3d (andnetwork.com)"The University of Tubingen in Germany has agreed to return to Egypt five fragments of a relief removed in the last century from the Temple of Pharaoh Seti I, Culture Minister Faruq Hosni said. The fragments, which...



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