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Updated: June 7, 2025
Several of these were opened by Belzoni, and were found in great preservation, with mummies in the sarcophagi, as well as dispersed through the chambers. Such was ancient Thebes a city so populous that, according to ancient writers, in times of war 10,000 soldiers issued from each of her hundred gates, forming an army of 1,000,000 men.
Belzoni, worming himself through the subterranean passages of the Egyptian catacombs, could not have met with great impediments than those we here encountered. But we struggled against them manfully, well knowing our only hope lay in advancing. Towards sunset we halted at a spot where we made preparations for passing the night.
As the visitor stands before this fragment of a stupendous piece of sculpture, he may recall to mind the points in the career of Giovanni Battista Belzoni.
The next tablet is that discovered by Belzoni, near the temple of Karnak, on which a line of adoring deities are represented. The tablets marked 548, 9, 51 have no particular points of interest; the visitor may therefore at once pass to the group, most of which are coloured yellow, and are elaborately embellished, marked from 555 to 598.
When Belzoni discovered this remarkable relic of Egyptian royalty, the lid had been thrown off and broken into pieces, and its contents rifled; the sarcophagus itself is in perfect preservation. The original copy of "Gerusalemme Liberata," in the handwriting of Tasso, is in the Soane Museum. It was purchased by Sir John Soane, at the sale of the Earl of Guilford's Library, in 1829.
The small statue of Bet-mes, a state officer of the sixth dynasty, found in a tomb at Gizeh, is remarkable for its extraordinary antiquity; and in this neighbourhood, also, is a statue of an Ethiopian prince of the time of the great Rameses, named Pah-ur, which was found by Belzoni in Nubia. The figure is kneeling, and holding an altar.
Salt, placed upon a white stone pedestal in an angle of the wall of the great temple, and showing on each of its sides representations of Thothmes III. of the 18th dynasty, holding the hands of deities, said by some to be the moat curious specimen of Egyptian bas-relief in the Museum; a fractured colossus in black granite, from Thebes, supposed to be part of a statue of Amenophis III.; the colossal head discovered at Karnak by Belzoni in 1818, supposed to represent the features of Thothmes III.; the head and upper part of a statue of Sesostris, known as the Young Memnon.
Nor will I take oath, that, had her project been accomplished, then, by help of lights hung at judicious intervals through the tunnel, some Belzoni or other might have succeeded in future ages in penetrating through the masonry, and actually emerging into the dining-room, and once there, it would have been inhospitable treatment of such a traveler to have denied him a recruiting meal.
Great, too, was our satisfaction in visiting Madame Belzoni, who used to receive us in rooms full of strange spoils, brought back by herself and her husband from the East; she sometimes smoked a long Turkish pipe, and generally wore a dark blue sort of caftan, with a white turban on her head.
Here he lingered for hours over ancient Egyptian tombstones; before colossal sarcophagi; thinking of the tough work Belzoni must have had of it with the young Memnon; endeavouring to realise the approach to the ancient Egyptian temples through rows of colossal and majestic sphinxes. Next he passed on to the ruins of Nineveh, and its mystic mounds.
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