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This probably hasn’t come up in conversation, but I am fatally attracted to stolen obelisks. I found my first stolen obelisk in Rome behind the Pantheon in the Piazza della Minerva 10 years ago, set on the back of a marble elephant carved by Bernini. Since then, I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to search for them.
The idea of these enormous monoliths being carried by ship around the world, the engineering feat to reseat them in a new environment, what is this hold that ancient Egypt has on us? That Babylon, Carthage, and Assyria did not?
So, of course, while in New York, I had to go to Central Park and find the obelisk.
It’s called “Cleopatra’s Needle”, originally carved from pink Aswan granite in 1400 BC-ish as one of a pair of obelisks to celebrate the third jubilee of Thutmosis III, an Egyptian pharaoh, for the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis on the Nile River. “Repurposed” by Caesar Augustus, who brought to Alexandria in 12 BC. for the Caesarium, the temple for Julius Caesar. Donated in exchange for foreign aid and remounted in Central Park, January 22nd, 1881. The other obelisk from the pair is in London.
Oh, the best part is that under each corner of the obelisk is the a bronze sea crab (an 800 pound bronze crab).
When humans are long gone and the cockroaches have evolved into intelligent life forms, what stories will they make up about our scattered spires of stone?