"Cleopatra's Needle" Obelisk


"Cleopatra's Needle" Obelisk built in 1443 BCE. (1600 BCE?)
It was erected first at Heliopolis, Egypt, and moved to Alexandria in 12 BCE by the Romans.
Later, presented to the City of New York by the Khedive of Egypt in 1879, and erected in Central Park early in 1881.
Pink granite; 69 ft. x 8 ft. 21 meters high and weighs about 180 tons.)
(Date disagreement, plaque says one date and museum website says another.)

What a marvelous feeling to stand beneath it and look way up:

It is immense. I took a photo of the hieroglyph translation, but if it is not legible, I suspect the translation is online.

"Cleopatra's Needle" obelisk mostly names "User Ma'at Ra", Ramesses II. But it was probably Thutmose III's first, and usurped by Ramesses II, which would account for dating discrepancy:


Everywhere, it makes reference to Ramesses, but they missed one 'Thutmose':


You can see Thutmose's 'MenKheperRa' cartouche at the center...

This obelisk is 69ft tall, but there's one at Luxor which is even taller, 82 feet tall and 254 tons. It was almost outdone. "There is an unfinished obelisk in the quarry at Aswan that weighs more than 1000 tons - as big as two jumbo jets," explains Bob Brier in his 'History of Ancient Egypt' DVD lectures (lecture excerpted in 'The Great Courses' catalog).

"The city that had more obelisks than any other in Egypt was Heliopolis, which is Greek for 'sun city.' It had more obelisks than any other city but there's only one left now, only one.

"Karnak Temple in Thebes, which grew to be the greatest temple in the history of the world, had a dozen obelisks. There were two that Tuthmosis I, Hatshepsut's father, erected. Hatshepsut had four, and her nephew, Thutmosis III, had six. But there are only two standing now in Karnak: one is Hatshepsut's, and one is her father's Thutmosis I.

"Hatshepsut was really most proud of the obelisks. She talked about having quarried two obelisks in seven months, transported them on a single barge, and then erected them at Karnak Temple. On the base of her obelisk she talks about the obelisks and say, 'I erected them for my father Amun. They could be seen from the other side of the Nile, their tips gleaming in electrum.' Electrum was a mixture of gold and silver. So the tip, the pyramid part, was gold-plated, so to speak. Hatshepsut used her obelisks as a kind of propaganda..." (Ibid)

Although Thutmose III bricked them up, that did not stop future archaelogists from finding them!