The Rape of the Nile

by Brian Fagan

  Relieved of his post in 1815, Drovetti was free to devote himself to antiquities and to travel, journeying to the Second Cataract in 1816. He admired the buried facade of the Abu Simbel temple and offered the local headman three hundred piastres to open it, to no avail. These were the years when he collected extensively around Thebes in ferocious competition with Giovanni Belzoni, the strongman turned tomb robber whom we will encounter in Chapter 5. Drovetti also traveled extensively to the oases of the Western Desert before becoming French consul general again in 1821, a post he held until he retired in 1829.

  This talented and hardworking man strongly influenced Muhammad Ali in matters of governmental policy. He also enjoyed enormous prestige with the Egyptians themselves. His interest in antiquities appears to have been strictly commercial. He pursued the past with a ruthless intensity that made him considerable sums of money.

  Colonel Ernest Missett (?–1820), a well-known and influential diplomat, served Britain’s interests as consul from 1802. He retired on grounds of ill health in 1816. Missett was not particularly interested in archaeology, but his successor, Henry Salt (1770–1827), certainly was. Salt’s early education was at best desultory until his teens, when he was sent to London to study landscape and portrait painting. He enrolled as a student at the Royal Academy and made a very casual living as a portrait painter, a career that at least brought him in contact with a wide range of people. One of these was Lord Valentia, later to become Lord Mountnorris, a wealthy aristocrat with a penchant for leisured travel to remote parts of the world. In 1802 Lord Valentia planned a journey to India and the East. Salt acquired the post of secretary and draftsman to the expedition. Valentia’s journey lasted four and a half years and culminated in a voyage of exploration along the Red Sea coast of Africa on board the warship HMS Panther, a side trip that provided Salt with his first taste of exploration.

  The young secretary now led a small party sent to the uplands of Ethiopia. At this time Ethiopia was a little-known and mysterious country, almost closed to Europeans. Its diplomatic and commercial potential was still unrealized, although many people were curious about the caliber and ambitions of its rulers. Salt and his party penetrated some distance inland and were hospitably entertained by the ras (ruler) of Tigray in northern Ethiopia, who even gave them letters and presents for the king of England purporting to come from the emperor of Ethiopia. This small expedition brought Salt to the attention of the Foreign Office, which sent him out on a second mission to Ethiopia with instructions to obtain details about the state of trade in the country. The new mission failed, for Salt was unable to go farther inland than Tigray, owing to disturbed political conditions in the far interior. Nevertheless, Salt published a book, A Voyage to Abyssinia (1814), which brought his name to public notice at an opportune moment when people with experience of Egypt and the Red Sea region were in short supply.

  Salt had spent some time in Egypt in 1807 where he had indulged his antiquarian interests, whetted by the discovery of a Greek inscription at the ancient city of Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands.14 The Nile Valley attracted him enormously, and he was determined to return. In early 1816, he heard that Colonel Missett had resigned. He immediately lobbied for the appointment, getting his influential friends to write to the foreign secretary in his support. Lord Castlereagh confirmed his appointment on very short notice. Henry Salt found himself an influential figure in Egyptian affairs at the age of thirty-five.

  The duties of the British and French consuls general were far from arduous. Both enjoyed considerable influence with the pasha, but the political issues were hardly of major importance. Relatively few foreigners resided permanently in Cairo. The British colony was tiny, and a representative in Alexandria handled maritime affairs. It is quite clear, however, that Salt’s sponsors had other ideas as to how he might best employ his time. The elderly naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Captain Cook to Tahiti in 1769 and acquired an international reputation as a scientist as a result, was now a trustee of the British Museum and saw Salt as a potential source of Egyptian antiquities for the national collections. The diplomat Sir William Hamilton, already notorious for his involvement in the Elgin Marbles controversy, was now undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office. He was much more explicit and urged Salt in an official memorandum to collect as many antiquities for “an enlightened nation” as possible.15

  Salt himself had a firm, and unfounded, belief in his skills as an Egyptologist and developed a deep interest in hieroglyphs. His character was a moody one. He alternated between intense optimism and deep depression, and had a tendency to procrastinate and be irresolute at times when quick decisions were needed, qualities that were dangerous when confronted with Drovetti’s mercurial passion and the pasha’s sudden changes of direction and unpredictable moods. Nevertheless, he enjoyed considerable influence with the Egyptian government. Many privileges and concessions were extended to him, a range of opportunities that provoked an intense rivalry between the British and French consuls general—Drovetti with his restless energy and deep bonds of affection with headmen and villages, and Salt, a more remote person, with money to spend and considerable political prestige.

  FIGURE 4.4 Bernardino Drovetti (left) and Henry Salt (right). From the author’s collection.

  Theoretically, the pasha himself controlled archaeological excavations in the Nile Valley. Any potential excavation required a firman (permit) to search for antiquities and to remove them from Egypt. The influential Drovetti and Salt were able to obtain as many firmans as they wanted. Their greed and rivalry became so intense that they reached an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement, if that is an appropriate description, to carve up the Nile Valley into “spheres of influence.” Other acquisitive visitors watched their step. Both Drovetti and Salt were so influential that they could arrange for the denial of firmans and ensure that local headmen would warn off potential excavators or refuse them laborers.

  The consuls’ activities legitimated the antiquities trade by creating an umbrella of casual tolerance for collecting. Some remarkable characters took up residence in Egypt on the alert for a quick killing. The Marseillais sculptor Jean Jacques Rifaud (1786–1852) was one longtime resident who went to Egypt in 1805 with the express intention of excavating and selling portable antiquities. This temperamental man ended up working for Drovetti for some years, accompanying him on his trip to the Second Cataract in 1816. An Armenian merchant named Giovanni Anastasi (1780–1860) was another well-known character. His father had been a major supplier of Napoléon’s commissariat and a surveyor who went bankrupt after the French defeat. After great effort, Anastasi became a successful merchant and subsequently Swedish-Norwegian consul general in Egypt, as well as a highly successful dealer in antiquities and especially papyri, bought through agents from tomb robbers at Saqqara. Artists, entrepreneurs, merchants, or just plain adventurers came to Egypt in search of treasure.

  No qualifications were needed to become a dealer or excavator, simply a tough constitution to cope with the harsh Nile environment, an ability to use bribery and gunpowder, and the political finesse that enabled successful applications for permits and delicate negotiations with other interested parties. Those were the rough-and-ready days of excavating. An excavator simply appropriated anything to which he took a fancy, from a scarab to an obelisk. They settled their differences with the help of thugs or with guns. One of the main characters of these far-from-heroic years of pillage and destruction was a giant and circus strongman, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, one of the most fascinating personalities ever to become involved in archaeology.

  PART TWO

  THE GREAT BELZONI

  I do not mean to say that fortune has made me

  rich; I do not consider all rich men fortunate;

  but she has given me that satisfaction, that

  extreme pleasure, which wealth cannot

  purchase; the pleasure of discovering what has

  long been sought in vain, and of presenting th
e

  world with a new and perfect monument of

  Egyptian antiquity . . . appearing as if just

  finished on the day we entered it.

  GIOVANNI BATTISTA BELZONI,

  Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries

  Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations,

  in Egypt and Nubia, on the discovery of pharaoh

  Seti I’s tomb

  5

  The Patagonian Sampson

  The principal cause of my going to Egypt was the project of

  constructing hydraulic machines, to irrigate the fields.

  GIOVANNI BELZONI,

  Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the

  Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia

  Adventurers and opportunists: the rough-and-tumble tomb robbers who descended on Mohammad Ali’s Egypt came in search of fame and, more important, fortune. Ancient Egypt paid a high price for their roistering. A new mania for things Egyptian coincided with the pasha’s desire to modernize his country. Napoléon’s scientists had copied and measured with reverential care. Now ancient Egyptian masonry vanished wholesale into the walls of new factories. Ali himself used the best sites and finest artifacts as diplomatic lures to further his goal of modernization. After centuries of neglect, the temples and tombs of the Nile crumbled before a ruthless, highly competitive onslaught fueled by Europe’s intense curiosity about, and hunger for, all things ancient Egyptian.

  Few of the robbers possessed either scruples or even imagination. They labored in obscurity with no ambitions beyond a vague, and usually unfulfilled, desire to acquire quick wealth. Two men dominated this hurlyburly world: the French consul general, Bernardino Drovetti, and one of the most remarkable individuals ever to rob a tomb, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, widely regarded as the greatest, and certainly the most colorful, tomb robber of them all.

  Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in Padua, Italy, on November 5.1778. He was one of the four children of Giacomo Belzoni, a barber of limited ambition who wanted his son to become a barber’s assistant. The young Giovanni never left the narrow world of Padua until he was thirteen years old, but the experience of going elsewhere left him with a lifelong wanderlust. In 1794, the strapping sixteen-year-old Belzoni left for Rome on the first of a series of endless wanderings. Padua had given him a sketchy education and some rudimentary understanding of mechanical things, but certainly no ambition to become a barber. For four years the young Paduan tarried in Rome, apparently striving to improve his education. Some biographers talk of his studying for the priesthood and acquiring a basic knowledge of hydraulics, but his education was, at best, sporadic, even by eighteenth-century standards.

  Political conditions in Italy were unsettled during Belzoni’s youth. Napoléon’s armies were in the process of conquering and annexing Italy for the Republic. In 1798 the French armies entered Rome in triumph. Young Belzoni fled northward, perhaps to avoid conscription into Napoléon’s regiments, loaded with an itinerant merchant’s pack of rosaries, religious images, and relics.

  The first trading venture seems to have been successful, for three years later the young Italian set out again, this time with his brother Francesco. They traveled far from home and engaged in petty trading around Amsterdam, Holland, where their imposing physiques and strength must have attracted attention. We do not know whether Belzoni was actually performing on the stage in Amsterdam, for in his later years and in his own biography he drew a complete veil over the early years of his life. The activities of a minor trader and acrobat were hardly a respectable background for a man who considered himself the stuff of which history is made and a public figure in the bargain.

  Giovanni and Francesco crossed to London in 1803. Why they sailed over the North Sea, we do not know, but it may have been that stage opportunities were better in Britain. Many Italians are known to have performed there in the early years of the nineteenth century. Whatever restless urge brought Belzoni to England, his stay in London was the first turning point in a remarkably varied life. London in 1803 was a rollicking capital city, full of lively spectacles and bawdy theatrical performances. There were many opportunities for acrobats and gymnasts, for jugglers and strongmen, as well as for straight actors. The London theatrical public demanded diversity on stage and got it. Producers changed their variety shows and individual acts at frequent intervals to cater to lively audiences with fickle tastes. A wide choice of theatrical events flourished in London during the summer months. Handbills and newspapers proclaimed the sensational and spectacular, each theater vying with the others to catch the interest of the volatile Londoner.

  Charles Dibdin Jr., owner of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, was one of the greatest London impresarios of the early nineteenth century. He had acquired the theater just before Belzoni’s arrival and was embarking on a successful entrepreneurial career, combining the offices of author, producer, and stage manager with great panache. In addition to a regular stable of actors, Dibdin bolstered his shows with numerous contract players engaged to play a single act or an entire season.

  Dibdin’s prompter was an Italian named Morelli, a popular actor and theatrical personality to whom “all the Italian minstrels and gymnastical performers used to apply, on their arrival in England,” wrote Dibdin in his memoirs.1 It was to this well-known agent that Giovanni Belzoni applied for work at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. One does not know what qualifications Belzoni brought to his application. One can only assume that he had gained some experience with theatrical work on the Continent. But he must have been an imposing figure, standing more than 1.98 meters (6 feet, 6 inches) high, with a handsome face—well portrayed in the pictures of Belzoni that have come down to us—and immense strength. Charles Dibdin was certainly impressed enough to engage Belzoni as a weight lifter and a player of minor parts.

  So in the summer of 1803 the “Patagonian Sampson,” a weight lifter of great prowess and skill, treated London theatergoers to a startling act. His act consisted of a series of weight-lifting feats that culminated in a humanpyramid display. The gaily dressed Belzoni would shoulder a massive iron frame weighing 58 kilograms (127 pounds) and fitted with ledges. Twelve members of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre company then perched on the frame, and the Patagonian Sampson strode around the stage without any apparent effort, waving two flags in his hands. This tour de force was deservedly popular with the theatrical public, so much so that Dibdin ran it for three months, also using the huge Italian in small plays and charades featured between major acts in the program. Many of these were small dramas, like the saga of Philip Quarll, an imaginative story of “an Englishman who lived a solitary life on an Island inhabited only by Monkies.”2

  FIGURE 5.1 Belzoni’s act at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. By permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

  In July 1803, Belzoni’s three-month contract with Sadler’s Wells expired and was not renewed. The reasons are not known, but the nonrenewal is surprising, for Belzoni’s act was popular with Londoners and Sadler’s Wells had enjoyed its best season in some years. Two months later he was performing in very different surroundings, appearing in a humanpyramid act at Bartholomew’s Fair, a popular annual event in the city of London. Bartholomew’s Fair, a far cry from Sadler’s Wells, was a bawdy and thoroughly hearty carnival with rides, numerous sideshows, stalls displaying everything from hurdy-gurdies to writing baboons, and, at one booth, the “French Hercules.”

  Fortunately, we have an eyewitness account of Belzoni’s act at the fair, from John Thomas Smith, at the time the keeper of drawings and prints at the British Museum and a well-known and garrulous commentator on the London scene. Smith and a friend visited the fair with some trepidation, for there was a real danger of robbery or mugging. The two of them stopped at Belzoni’s stall and watched him lift a series of heavy weights. Then the French Hercules asked for volunteers to form a human pyramid on his shoulders. Smith and four others stepped forward and climbed on
to chairs to reach Belzoni’s massive shoulders. “Sampson performed his task with an ease of step most stately,” remarked Smith. Belzoni was carrying quite a weight, for the fourth member of the pyramid was a “heavy dumpling, whose chops, I will answer for it, relished many an inch thick steak from the once far-famed Honey Lane market.”3

  Giovanni Belzoni went on to become a familiar figure in London and the provinces during the next few years, traveling from fair to fair throughout the British Isles, performing acts of strength and doomed, as the Gentleman’s Magazine put it, “to bear on his colossal frame, not fewer, if we mistake not, than 20 or 22 persons moving across the stage as stately as the elephant with the Persian warriors.”4 He soon expanded his theatrical repertoire to include some trick effects and displays with waterworks and stage hydraulics. He was soon billed as “the Great Belzoni,” a title that ensured him bookings all over Britain over the next eight years, a period when his wanderlust was at its most intense and when he acquired a working knowledge of weight lifting, the use of levers and rollers, balancing techniques, and what were known as “hydrauliks,” acts onstage involving water, useful skills for any tomb robber.