In the early 19th century, Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian who aspired to be a respected Englishman, talked his way into the good graces of colonial officials and Middle Eastern warlords to gain access to the neglected or buried monuments of ancient Egypt.
Belzoni lived a life only slightly less fantastical than Indiana Jones. He braved the harshest of conditions, threats of violence, and the intrigue that roiled the treasure hunting of his day. He came away with priceless objects and shipped them back to the British Museum, in London.
For all that, he earned the disdain of archaeology’s first formal practitioners, who, while profiting from his enterprise, rejected Belzoni as a foreigner, not sufficiently “one of us,” and then branded him a plunderer.
Far different was the career of another great figure of 19th-century Egyptology, James Henry Breasted. At the other end of the 1800s, working with the benefit of more-settled disciplinary practices, Breasted began an illustrious career that would make him the father of American Egyptology as well as a formative figure in American higher education.
Two new books serve to contrast the two lives: Ivor Noël Hume’s Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate (University of Virginia Press) and Jeffrey Abt’s American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute (University of Chicago Press).
In Noël Hume’s entertaining account, Belzoni, a Padua barber’s son born in 1778, ventured to London as a young man to seek a career in hydraulic engineering. To make ends meet, the 6-foot-6-inch “giant” became a circus performer of feats of strength, a “Patagonian Samson” in demeaning costumes. He also staged conjuring tricks, and his own comic pastiche of Macbeth. And he devised “a most curious Exhibition of Hydralicks” from fountains of water and flame.
All that took him around Europe, and in 1815, in Malta, he fell in with an emissary of the redoubtable Muhammad Ali Pasha, the viceroy of Egypt, hoping to sell him his system for more efficiently harvesting water from the Nile.
Failing to do that, Belzoni capitalized on Europe’s burgeoning discovery of ancient Egypt as a theater of study. A British consul sent him to Luxor to obtain relics. Belzoni resourcefully removed a toppled 60-foot, seven-ton bust, “the Young Memnon,” by having it laboriously dragged to the Nile and transported to London.
Encouraged by that success, he opened the massive rock temples of Abu Simbel and Karnak to discover carved statues of such deities as the falcon-headed Horus. He was the first man in millennia to enter the astonishing pyramid of Chephren at Giza. He came away with statues, pottery, and knowledge of Egyptian burial practices. And, in the manner of his time, he blasted his way into tombs and stomped around on relics. He relied on local indifference to “old stones” and inattention to the theft of papyri from graves.
For his accomplishments, Belzoni wanted little more than a letter of recommendation to the Society of Antiquaries of London, but he never did get it from the hypocritical snobs who hired him to bring them relics. Instead, several generations of archaeologists would denounce him as “the most notorious tomb robber Egypt has ever known.”
Noël Hume objects to that characterization. He says that, long before such tools as carbon dating, DNA testing, and spectrographic analysis, Belzoni “did the best he could, and if the wagging finger of blame must be pointed, it should be aimed at the gentleman scholars, curators, and collectors who hired him, profited from him, and eventually abandoned him.”
On the phone from Williamsburg, Va., Noël Hume says: “We tend to think of the past in our own terms, which is a terrible mistake because the past isn’t the least bit like how things are today. In fact, Belzoni was ahead of his time, in that he realized there was a lot to be learned from Egyptology that wasn’t understood at all, and he made careful studies of mummies and things like that. His mind really was working in the right direction.”
Noël Hume admits to a certain affection for Belzoni, not least because he shares with him an early history in theater: The British-born author worked as a stagehand and playwright before happening into archaeology in the late 1940s. And, like Belzoni, Noël Hume was, at least early in his career, scorned as too much of an outsider by the Society of Antiquaries.
But, again like Belzoni, Noël Hume showed them: From 1957 to 1988 he directed archaeological research at Colonial Williamsburg, and he has written more than 20 scholarly and popular books that have established him as a founding figure in American historical archaeology.
Several decades after Belzoni had published an enormously popular account of his Egyptian adventures, and then died in West Africa in 1823 of dysentery or murder, a far different figure would transform studies of antiquity in the United States. As Jeffrey Abt relates in his thorough, compelling study, James Henry Breasted was a language prodigy in the Midwest who aspired to a life in Christian ministry before drifting into Egyptology, then a wide-open field in America. Among Breasted’s motivations, writes Abt, an associate professor of art and art history at Wayne State University, was finding mistranslations from Hebrew sources in the King James Bible. Indeed, religious and scholarly interests would intertwine throughout his career.
Studying with leading specialists in Germany, Breasted wrote a dissertation about hymns to Aten the sun god, composed under Amenhotep IV. That king, who ruled Egypt from 1353 to 1336 BC, and became known as Akhenaton, had elevated Aten above all other gods. In that action, Breasted saw a precursor of monotheism.
During his many expeditions to the same sites that Belzoni had earlier trod, Breasted developed the concept that Western civilization derived not just from Greece and Rome, but from the Nile Valley, before them. He believed the Egyptians had discovered the “inner values” and “social idealism” that elevated humanity “from savagery to civilization.” That was, Breasted proclaimed toward the end his career, “the greatest discovery in the whole course of evolution ... a new realm at whose gates we are still standing hesitant.”
He began working at the University of Chicago in 1894. From 1901, he directed its Haskell Oriental Museum, charged with expanding its collection of Egyptian antiquities. In 1919 he began to create the Oriental Institute at the campus, with backing from the likes of John D. Rockefeller.
It would become a pioneering institution of American higher education, a dedicated center for the collection, study, and teaching of the ancient Middle East. By phone from Detroit, Abt says: “I began with an interest in university museums and their relationship around the turn of the century with teaching institutions, and particularly how museums became vehicles for disciplines to establish their working methods.”
But another aspect of Breasted’s accomplishment emerged as perhaps more important, he says: With his popular publications and scholarly advocacy, “Breasted did an awful lot to establish ancient Near Eastern history as an important subject for us, as Americans, to understand our civilization.”
