The Needle

If we start at the very beginning, as historians are wont to do unless threatened with violence, we have to go back three thousand five hundred years to the quarry at Syené, famed for being the source of rose-colored granite.  Using an iron chisel to drill holes, the workmen pounded wooden wedges into the holes.  The wedges were soaked in water and slowly expanded, splitting off a long solid rectangle of seamless granite.  Though the unfinished stone weighed well over 250 tons, it will be moved by hand to the site where the artists will dress the stone and prepare it for display.

The stone was laboriously moved by ropes and wooden rollers to a tributary of the Nile River where a deep hole had been dug and a wooden barge had been built in the depression.  After the stone had been placed upon the barge, the sand between the pit and river was dug out, floating the barge that was then towed 600 miles to Heliopolis.  

Once the monolith reached the intended site, workmen began the lengthy job of cutting and polishing the stone.  Once prepared, a pit was dug under the base of the stone and thousands of men pulling with ropes were finally able to stand the 68-foot polished obelisk upright.  After it was firmly anchored, stone masons then carved hieroglyphs on two opposing sides honoring the pharaoh, Thutmose III.  I’d furnish a translation but it is mostly lots of lofty prose about how much Thutmose is the reincarnation of the sun god.  Rah! Rah! Ra!

While records of how long it took to finish cutting, polishing, and engraving the stone no longer exist, the records for similar monuments suggest that the process may have taken 20 years or more.  While this might seem like a excessive time, remember that all the work was done by hand and (so far) the work has lasted more than three and a half millennia.  Using the very best in modern machinery, my city has had to repave the street in from of my house roughly every eight years.

Two centuries later, Ramesses II took advantage of the two blank sides of the obelisk and added a little more prose about his own recent military victories.  Considering that it took two decades to erect your own obelisk, placing your ads on a billboard that was already standing is understandable.  Ramesses II did this to a lot of monuments, linking himself to respected, previous pharaohs, but electing to chisel out the references to other, less popular leaders.  

In 12 BC, the obelisk was one of two moved to Alexandria to decorate the Caesarium, designed by Cleopatra to honor both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, but this monument was not completed until after her death, during the reign of Caesar Augustus.  There, the two obelisks stood side by side for a long time.  No one is sure when our obelisk toppled over and was half buried by the blowing sands, but it was described as fallen by visitors repeatedly for centuries.  It was partially uncovered by the scientists who accompanied Napoleon after he conquered the fortified city on June 1, 1798.

Three years later, the obelisk was in view when Napoleon lost the Battle of Alexandria, ending the French occupation of Egypt.  In appreciation for that victory as well as Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile, Khedive Muhammad Ali Pasha gave the obelisk to the British Government in 1819.  Unfortunately, after decades of fighting the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Americans, and damn near everyone else on the planet, the British were just a little short of cash for shipping, so while grateful, they let the monolith just stay where it was.

As the blowing sands once again slowly covered the monument, all of Europe became increasingly fascinated with all things Egypt, in part fueled by all the great quantity of artifacts that Napoleon had stolen, only to have them liberated by England.  By liberating, I mean the British kept them safe in the British Museum in London.  

In 1877, Sir William James Erasmus Wilson, a London doctor, decided it was time for England to pick up its present.  Raising £10,000 (the equivalent of £1,000,000 in today’s money), Wilson began the arduous project of bringing the obelisk back to London.  Hoping for government support of the project, a more or less accurate wooden reproduction of the obelisk was erected in front of parliament, the location in which Wilson hoped to place the monument.

For the first time in almost two millennia, the stone was completely uncovered, and just in the nick of time, for the locals had forgotten the location of the obelisk and were in the process of building a house over it.  Working with railway engineers, the monument was enclosed in a watertight iron tube, 95 feet long and 16 feet in diameter.  The container, equipped with a keel, a rudder, and a platform for mounting sails, was constructed in London, shipped in pieces to Alexandria, and reassembled around the obelisk.  The resulting strange ship—technically a pontoon barge—was christened the Cleopatra, after the queen who probably never came anywhere near the stone in life.  This strange vessel was to be towed to England by the steamship Olga.

When the voyage was almost complete, a storm arose in the Bay of Biscay.  In the rough seas, the long tube began rolling uncontrollably despite the best efforts of the crew, six of whom lost their life in the attempt.  When the Cleopatra began taking on water, the Captain of the Olga cut loose the pontoon and reported the vessel as ”abandoned and sinking”.

Four days later, a Glasgow steamer discovered the abandoned Cleopatra, still afloat, and towed her to Spain, immediately filing a salvage claim against the vessel.  After settling the claim, a British steam-powered paddle tug finished the job of towing the Cleopatra to London, finally arriving on January 21, 1878.  By now, the obelisk was generally believed to be cursed, so Parliament declined the honor of having the monument erected nearby, and the obelisk was finally erected at the Victoria Wharf on the Thames River.  

To honor the obelisk, large brass sphinxes was placed on either side of it.  If the two brass statues are to honor the obelisk they are technically supposed to face away from the monument, but when Queen Victoria said they would look better the other way around, the works were quickly rotated. 

At the dedication, the obelisk was named Cleopatra’s Needle.  The irony of the name was not mentioned at the dedication ceremony, nor did any of the newspaper accounts mention that the sphinxes actually predate the obelisk by a thousand years.  If you go to see the monument today, note the damage to the plinths supporting the brass statues.  The damage was done by a German bomb during World War I.  (Though almost all of the guidebooks claim it happened during the Blitz of World War II.)

Less well remembered is that under Cleopatra’s Needle is a time capsule containing a rather odd assortment of everyday items such as a box of cigars and children’s toys.  Five thousand years from now, when future archaeologists discover the remains of the monument and the time capsule is opened, they will find enclosed a large painting of the queen.  When they transport the obelisk home and put the monolith on display, doubtlessly they will name it Victoria’s Needle.

By the way, the other obelisk from Alexandria, the one that never fell down, was given by the Pasha to the people of America and is now standing in Central Park in New York.  But that is a story for another day.