It is more than half a century since the last good book on Giovanni Belzoni, by Stanley Mayes, was published. Here, our Fellow Noël Hume, better known as the former Director of the Colonial Williamsburg archaeological research programme, presents a splendid and up-to-date story of the, literally, giant (2m tall) and pioneer Egyptologist. Many writers of recent years have had a tendency to denigrate Belzoni and his work, but Howard Carter wrote that his work in the Valley of the Kings was the first large-scale excavations in the Valley, and ‘we must give Belzoni full credit for the manner in which they were carried out … on the whole the work was extraordinarily good’. Belzoni's detractors fail to recognize the period and ethos of the period in which he worked, and they should be mindful of Matthew 7:1. Noël Hume's new biography firmly places Belzoni as a pioneer who really thought about his discoveries – he was no rabid collector like his rival Drovetti without any thought for interpretation or context. Howard Carter said that Belzoni's Narrative …, published in 1820, ‘is one of the most fascinating books in the whole of Egyptian literature’, and Belzoni sent detailed accounts of his discoveries to the Antiquaries that are recorded in the Society's minute books.

From humble beginnings in Padua via the fairgrounds of Europe, fate cast him into Egypt where, against all initial adversities, he found and followed a calling. Some of the finest sculptures in the British Museum, notably the colossal seven-and-a-half ton head of Ramesses ii, and much else, the sarcophagus of Seti i in Sir John Soane's Museum and the lid of the sarcophagus of Ramesses iii in Cambridge, are all due to his endeavours. Added to those, he retrieved the Philae obelisk for William John Bankes (now at Kingston Lacey) whose inscriptions were to be vital in Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs in 1822. Belzoni was the first European to enter the Second Pyramid, of Chephren, at Giza (2 March 1818), and the first to find the entrance to the Great Temple at Abu Simbel (1 August 1817) and, five years before Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, realized that the ‘hero’ depicted on the walls there was the same he saw on temple walls in Thebes, ie Ramesses ii.

Noël Hume brings Belzoni to life using his own words and the world in which he carried out his explorations, and adds much new insight into that life as well as his own pertinent observations. He particularly puts more flesh onto the person of Belzoni's long-suffering but devoted wife, Sarah. It is axiomatic that on excavations the best finds turn up on the last day, and Noël Hume has been similarly devilled. Belzoni died at Gato in Benin in 1823, and Sarah in Jersey in January 1870. Mayes did not know where she was buried and both Noël Hume and the reviewer (unbeknown to each other) have for years been trying to locate her grave via Jersey local newspapers, radio and personal contact, to no avail. As, literally, the book came off the presses word came that her grave and inscribed tombstone had been found, recording ‘Sarah, widow of Giovanni Baptista Belzoni’ and the small foot-stone ‘S.B. 1870’. Now the chase is on for details of how and who provided for her burial. Egyptological research, even after a couple of centuries, always has surprises and goals to pursue.