The main objective of this article is to allow a better understanding of the relationship
between the British Empire and Ancient Egypt, and show the ways through which European
countries – and particularly Great Britain – used the image of the Egyptian civilization to
build a national identity and memory. Antiquarians who travelled to search for exotic
antiquities had a very important role in this process because they left in their notes a record
of their thoughts about the cultures of the places they visited and about the material culture
they found there. These memories and reports circulated in Europe and were regarded as a
source of knowledge, since they offered a version of the unknown “other†and reported the
travelers’ interpretations of the past and present of foreign places. In this article I analyze the
journal of one of these antiquarians, Giovanni Belzoni, in order to understand how his
discourse may have corroborated the construction of a national identity, since he helped to
form a large collection of Egyptian pieces of the British Museum, in England.
