Giovanni Battista Belzoni, sometimes known as The Great Belzoni, was a prolific Italian explorer and pioneer archaeologist of Egyptian antiquities.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni was an Italian, engineer and explorer, and amateur archaeologist, often regarded as one of the first Egyptologists. His discoveries include the tomb of Seti I, the temple at Karnak, and the pyramid of Khafre, making a fundamental contribution to our knowledge of ancient Egypt. Untrained in archaeological methods, Belzoni caused damage to various sites he explored. His focus on removing valuable artifacts and transporting them to museums would no longer be considered acceptable practice. Nonetheless, in Belzoni’s time such practices were the norm, and his work is recognized as opening the way to the study of ancient Egypt, a culture that has great significance in human history.

Originally planning to join a religious order, Belzoni went to England in 1803 where he turned his powerful six-foot seven-inch physique to earning a living as a circus strongman. He also exhibited models of hydraulic engines and in 1815 he went to Cairo to offer to Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, hydraulic engines for use in irrigation. Two years later he had embarked on a new career, excavating Egyptian tombs and temples for their treasures with scant regard for incidental damage to less desirable items. Many of his archaeological feats might today be regarded as pillage.
At Thebes he obtained the colossal sculpture of the head of Ramses II (“the Young Memnon”) for the British Museum; in the nearby Valley of the Tombs of Kings, he discovered the tomb of Seti I and removed the aragonite sarcophagus for the Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Though he managed to make off with an obelisk from the Nile island of Philae (Jazīrat Fīlah), near Aswān, it was taken from him at gunpoint by agents working for French interests. He explored Elephantine (Jazīrat Aswān) and the temple of Edfu (Idfu), cleared the entrance to the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, was first to penetrate the pyramid of Khafre at Giza, and identified the ruins of the city of Berenice on the Red Sea. He returned to England in 1819 and published an account of his adventures, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia . . . , 2 vol. (1820). He died in western Africa as he began a journey to Timbuktu. In 1825 his widow exhibited in Paris and London his drawings and models of the royal tombs of Thebes. Great Belzoni, a biography written by Stanley Mayes, appeared in 1959.