Collectors and the Antiquities Trade

The Description de l'Égypte made Egypt fashionable. In the decades that followed, European consuls in Egypt competed to collect statues, coffins and papyri for the museums and private collections of their home countries. Muhammad Ali, Egypt's ruler, gave them permits to dig; local workers did the labor.

Key idea

In the early 1800s, collectors such as Giovanni Belzoni, working for the British consul Henry Salt, and Bernardino Drovetti, the French consul, shipped thousands of objects to Europe. Many are now treasures of the British Museum, the Louvre and the Egyptian Museum in Turin. But almost nothing was recorded about where or how they were found, so much of what those objects could have told us is lost.

Why it works

An object's findspot is evidence. A statue from a temple sanctuary means something different from the same statue in a later house or a rubbish pit. Collectors wanted the object, not the information around it, and they dug fast, broke through walls and sometimes used force. Once a site is dug carelessly, the arrangement of things in it is gone for good.

Giovanni Belzoni

Belzoni (1778–1823), a tall Paduan who had performed as a strongman in London, came to Egypt in 1815 to sell a water-lifting machine. Hired by Salt, he moved the colossal head of Ramesses II known as the "Younger Memnon" from the Ramesseum to the river in 1816; it is now in the British Museum. In 1817 he cleared the sand from the entrance of the great temple at Abu Simbel and found the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, the finest decorated tomb then known. He also found the entrance to Khafre's pyramid at Giza.

Rival collectors and their collections.
Collector	Worked for	Where much of it went
Giovanni Belzoni	Henry Salt, British consul	British Museum (the "Younger Memnon"); Seti I's sarcophagus went to Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Henry Salt	Britain	British Museum; a later collection to the Louvre
Bernardino Drovetti	France	the Egyptian Museum in Turin, founded 1824 around his collection

The age of the collectors, between the French expedition and Egypt's first decree against exporting antiquities (1835).

Worked example: What was lost?

A painted coffin reached a European collection in 1820 with a label saying only "from Thebes". What information is missing, and why does it matter?

We do not know which tomb it came from, who was buried with it, or what lay beside it.
Without the tomb, we cannot date it by its surroundings, link it to a family, or tell whether it was reused.
The coffin is still beautiful, but as historical evidence it has lost most of its story.

Answer: Its findspot and associations; without them it can be studied only as an object.

Worked example: Belzoni's credit and cost

Belzoni is praised for his finds and blamed for his methods. Give one reason for each.

Praise: he found Seti I's tomb and opened Abu Simbel, and he drew and described what he saw; some of his records are still useful.
Blame: he dug for objects to ship, damaged structures to move them (he broke column bases at the Ramesseum to clear a path), and kept no systematic record of context.
Both are true: judge him by the standards of his time, and learn from what was lost.

Answer: Great discoveries; no method for recording context.

Common mistake

Thinking early collectors were archaeologists. They took objects, often with no record of where they came from. Check any museum object's history: if its findspot is unknown, ask why.

In 1835 Muhammad Ali issued a decree against exporting antiquities and planned a museum in Cairo. It was poorly enforced, but it was a start: see Laws on Antiquities.

Collectors and the Antiquities Trade

Giovanni Belzoni

Practice

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Sources and further reading