William J. Bankes

A wealthy member of English upper society (though not an aristocrat), Bankes was a Cambridge graduate and an acquainted of Lord Byron and the Duke of Wellington. He served several terms as MP for Cambridge University, Marlborough, and  Dorset between 1822 and 1835. He travelled extensively in Spain, Italy, Greece, Syria, Egypt, and Nubia between 1812 and 1819. His main interested were architecture and Greek epigraphy, but he was an unskilled draughtsman and a lazy travelogue writer. He nevertheless hired many talented people to cross the Nile valley and the deserts on his behalf to document as much as possible of the monuments of antiquity and, incidentally, the modern customs and the natural environment. He gathered a small but interesting collection of Egyptian antiquities, now on display at his lavish residence of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, including a Ptolemaic obelisk from the Island of Philae that was crucial, with its Greek-inscribed pedestal, in the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. His contributions in the field of Nabatean studies are very important. He was an avid art collector and had a taste for polemics. He spent the last years of his life in self-imposed exile in Italy after his homosexuality was exposed.

Bankes' People

Henry William Beechey (1789–1862), British artist and traveler, was secretary to British Consul Henry Salt from 1815 to 1820.

Dawson, Bierbrier, and Uphill, Who Was Who, 37; Patricia Usick, “Berth under the Highest Stars: Henry William Beechey in Egypt 1816–1819,” in Egypt through the Eyes of Travellers, ed. Paul G. Starkey and Nadia El Kholy (Cambridge: ASTENE, 2002), 13–24.

Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds (1799–1883) was a French geographer, explorer, artist, and engineer of noble descent. After a period in a naval career, Linant went to Egypt in 1817 in the company of the Count de Forbin. He soon entered the service of Muhammad Ali and William J. Bankes. In 1869, he was created minister of public works by Khedive Isma‘il.

Dawson, Bierbrier, and Uphill, Who Was Who, 256–57; Jean Mazuel, L’Oeuvre Géographique de  Linant de Bellefonds: Étude de Géographie Historique (Cairo: Société Royale de Géographie d’Égypte, 1937); Marcel Kurz, “Un homme d’action dans l’Égypte du XIXe siècle,” in Voyage aux mines d’or du Pharaon, ed. Marcel Kurz (Saint Clément de Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2002), 17–101.

Alessandro Ricci (1792-1834) was an Italian physician and draughtsman. He moved to Egypt in 1817 and soon entered the service of Henry Salt, who lent him to Giovanni B. Belzoni and W.J. Bankes. He travelled in Egypt, Sinai, Siwa, Nubia ans Sennar, where he "saved" the life of Ibrahim Pasha, head of the Turco-Egyptian army conquering Sudan, who was suffering from dysentery. With the prize awarded to him by the Pasha, he returned to Italy and later became acquainted with Ippolito Rosellini and Jean-Francois Champollion, whom he accompanied in their expedition to Egypt in 1828-29. He suddenly fell ill in 1832 and died a couple of years later, while his collection of Egyptian antiquities was acquired by the Grand Duke of Tuscany.