NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Giuseppe Passalacqua (1797–1865)

NOTABLE ARCHAEOLOGISTS Giuseppe Passalacqua (1797–1865)

Born in Italy, Passalacqua became an excavator and a collector after an unsuccessful stint as a horse dealer, the business that had originally taken him to Egypt. His excavations at Deir el-Bahri, on the west bank of Thebes (Luxor), from

1822 to 1825, revealed the tombs of priests and priestesses of Amun.

When he offered to sell his collection, drawn from Thebes and other sites, to the French government, it was rejected, but most of it was then acquired by Frederick William IV, ruler of Prussia, for Berlin’s Egyptian Museum. Passalacqua became conservator of the Egyptian collections at the Berlin museum in 1828 and spent the rest of his life there, organizing the material he had excavated.