After leaving the circus, Belzoni, his wife Sarah, and their Irish servant James Curtin traveled to Malta (Giovanni Belzoni). Here Belzoni met an official agent of Mohammed Ali Pasha, who convinced the explorer to go to Egypt. The tales of treasure interested Belzoni and he agreed. While in Cairo he offered his invention of a hydraulic machine to Mohammed Ali Pasha (The Great Belzoni). Though his invention increased the availability of water, Mohammed Ali Pasha threw him from the palace.

Luckily, Belzoni met up with a British Consul General named Henry Salt. Salt convinced Belzoni to gather treasures and discover finds to send back to the British museum. Belzoni quickly left for Thebes “to remove the colossal stone head of Ramses II to be delivered to the British museum” (The Great Belzoni). Following were journeys to the temple Edfu, Philae, and Elephantine. Here he also “cleared the great temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, excavated at Karnak.”

For the next few years, Belzoni would do things that few or no one had done. He was charged with the difficult task of moving the two seated statues of Ramses II from Luxor to the British Museum. The statues were buried up to their heads in sand and it was believed that beneath the statues was a large temple. The task at hand required much manpower because the heads alone weighed over 7 tons.

In 1817, he traveled to the Valley of Kings and discovered the tombs of Amenhotep III, Ramses I, Merneptah and Ay. While investigating these tombs he spotted indications of another royal tomb near the tomb of Ramses I. Eighteen feet below the surface of the ground, Belzoni found the entrance to the sepulcher of Seti I, Ramses I's son.

At the age of 40 in 1812, Belzoni left England with his wife Sara. They journeyed to Malta, where Belzoni learned from a Captain Ishmail that the Pasha of Egypt, a former Macedonian mercenary named Muhammed Ali, needed a hydraulic engineer. Ali was very Western-minded, desiring modern knowledge to develop his poverty-stricken country. Belzoni wrote of Cairo, "It was barbarous, really barbarous, and it remains so to this day." Of course, he came to the city when it was torn apart by plague.

When Belzoni finally got an audience with the Pasha, Ali was less than enthusiastic about his plans for a new ox-driven water pump. But he did award Belzoni a tiny government allowance which permitted him to live a while longer in Egypt. During this time, Belzoni met Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, who had adopted Arabic dress and managed to travel to places in Egypt no other European had yet seen. He described to Belzoni both the Abu Simbel temple in Nubia to Belzoni, and a part of a colossal statue known as the "Young Memnon" in Luxor.

Belzoni was intrigued by these discoveries. He applied to Henry Salt, then British consul, to move the colossus to England. Salt granted permission and also promise to provide the required funds. Days later, equipped with only four poles and some rope made locally, Belzoni sailed down the Nile to Luxor and identified the statue. After three weeks of moving several columns in his way, Belzoni had the bust safely on a boat bound for England. This statue, a bust really, measured 9 feet high.Burckhardt described the feat this way: "He handles masses of this kind with as much facility as others handle pebbles, and the Egyptians who see him a giant in figure, for he is over six feet and a half tall, believe him to be a sorcerer."

In the following year of 1818, Belzoni was the first person in “modern time” to enter the pyramid of Khafre at Giza (Archeology Explorer). He used “his engineering genius to locate the entrance to the inner chambers...” Belzoni was also the first European to visit the oasis of Siwah and to identify the ruined city of Berenice on the Red Sea.

In 1819, Belzoni returned to England. A year later in 1820, he published a book that made him quite famous. It was entitled Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia. this work is credited as being the first English research in Egyptology. Three editions of the book were published and it was received with great interest.

On May 1, 1921, Belzoni got an opportunity to share his finds. A great exhibition called Egyptian Hall was set up in Piccadilly near Piccadilly Circus. This room reflected Belzoni’s expeditions and contained plaster casts from the tomb of Seti I.

While on an excavation to Timbuktu in northwestern Africa , Belzoni caught dysentery and died on December 3, 1823 at Gato in Benin. He was buried under an Arasma tree in Gwata, a nearby village. Despite his fame, his widow lived the rest of her days in poverty until 1870.

Belzoni was no intellectual scholar, he was an amateur archaeologist. As an explorer he was motivated by finding hidden treasure so that he could sell the artifacts to collectors. His methods were often destructive and quite unorthodox but his discoveries laid the foundation for the scientific study of Egyptology. From this point of view, Howard Carter summed up Belzoni as "one of the most remarkable men in the entire history of Archaeology."