Rene Belloq

René Emile Belloq was a French archaeologist and rival of his American counterpart Indiana Jones.

Born in Marseilles, Belloq studied archaeology at the Sorbonne where he met and befriended Jones but eventually plagiarized his work with which he went on to win the Archaeological Society Prize. A career at the Louvre was cut short when Belloq was suspected of funding a grave robbing expedition and afterwards became a mercenary archaeologist with increasingly unethical methods in carrying out his work.

Over the following years, Belloq embarked on several adventures in the pursuit of artifacts, often pre-empting or in the wake of Indiana Jones. The involvement of his rival, however, managed to frustrate many of Belloq's plans on a number of occasions.

In 1936, after claiming a golden Chachapoyan fertility idol from Jones in Peru, Belloq was hired by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to assist in the Reich's search for the Ark of the Covenant, an expedition that would ultimately be his undoing.