BELZONI: BURNINATING FOR THE GUD OF ENGLAND
So, last night
kantayra and I watched Egypt, the BBC docudrama miniseries that focuses on the lives of three early, uh, "Egyptologists."
Okay, so Champollion definitely counts, and Carter . . . well, I'll get into that another time. But for whatever reason they decided to make the second segment of the series about Giovanni Belzoni, an engineer-cum-circus strongman-cum-explorer who decided to inflict his talents on Egypt in the early 19th century.
Now, I've never read Belzoni's account of his travels, and to be honest I don't really know much about him at all, except that he was a player in the early days of smash and grab archaeology, and he liked to set things on fire. All of this was captured in the movie, which would not have been so bad, except that they presented this as a good thing.
So, here is what we learned from watching the BBC's take on Belzoni, here portrayed by actor Matthew Kelly:
He was kind of a dick. Okay, scratch that, he was a lot of a dick:
And his wife was SO ANNOYING OMG:
Also, Belzoni would put his name on and steal any antiquity that was not attached to the ground, and even then he would try, FOR THE GUD OF ENGLAND, because those Natives and those French Thugs wouldn't know what to do with these priceless treasures! They just wanted to take them for profit!!! Plus, he liked to put fire on everything:
All his major accomplishments seemed to involve seeing something big and either a) moving it or b) going inside of it. To his credit, he did actually do some drawings of some of the monuments that he explored, which, as you can see in these examples, were totally accurate.
So, in conclusion:
ETA: Oh, oh, oh, I totally forgot the most important part! Interspersed throughout the Belzoni action were flashback sequences to Ramesses II, because they were trying to play up this ~mysterious connection~ between Belzoni and Ramesses. I mean, doesn't it seem strange that Belzoni would keep running into monuments built by Ramesses II? It's not like you can't turn around in Egypt without running into something built by Ramesses II or anything like that! Anyway, this is Ramesses:
Ramesses uses L'Oreal Feria in Double Intensity Auburn, because he's worth it (TM)!
Also, Ramesses had the audacity to claim direct descent from a god, which was crossing the line even for a pharaoh, OMG! No Pharaoh had ever done that before in the entire history of Egypt. Really. Not ever.
I'll leave you with this image of Ra:
kantayra and I watched Egypt, the BBC docudrama miniseries that focuses on the lives of three early, uh, "Egyptologists."
Okay, so Champollion definitely counts, and Carter . . . well, I'll get into that another time. But for whatever reason they decided to make the second segment of the series about Giovanni Belzoni, an engineer-cum-circus strongman-cum-explorer who decided to inflict his talents on Egypt in the early 19th century.
Now, I've never read Belzoni's account of his travels, and to be honest I don't really know much about him at all, except that he was a player in the early days of smash and grab archaeology, and he liked to set things on fire. All of this was captured in the movie, which would not have been so bad, except that they presented this as a good thing.
So, here is what we learned from watching the BBC's take on Belzoni, here portrayed by actor Matthew Kelly:
He was kind of a dick. Okay, scratch that, he was a lot of a dick:
And his wife was SO ANNOYING OMG:
Also, Belzoni would put his name on and steal any antiquity that was not attached to the ground, and even then he would try, FOR THE GUD OF ENGLAND, because those Natives and those French Thugs wouldn't know what to do with these priceless treasures! They just wanted to take them for profit!!! Plus, he liked to put fire on everything:
All his major accomplishments seemed to involve seeing something big and either a) moving it or b) going inside of it. To his credit, he did actually do some drawings of some of the monuments that he explored, which, as you can see in these examples, were totally accurate.
So, in conclusion:
ETA: Oh, oh, oh, I totally forgot the most important part! Interspersed throughout the Belzoni action were flashback sequences to Ramesses II, because they were trying to play up this ~mysterious connection~ between Belzoni and Ramesses. I mean, doesn't it seem strange that Belzoni would keep running into monuments built by Ramesses II? It's not like you can't turn around in Egypt without running into something built by Ramesses II or anything like that! Anyway, this is Ramesses:
Ramesses uses L'Oreal Feria in Double Intensity Auburn, because he's worth it (TM)!
Also, Ramesses had the audacity to claim direct descent from a god, which was crossing the line even for a pharaoh, OMG! No Pharaoh had ever done that before in the entire history of Egypt. Really. Not ever.
I'll leave you with this image of Ra: