Obelisk: A History

Cambridge, MA: Burndy Library, 2009. Soft cover. Fine. 8vo. Soft cover. 383 pp. Fine. Nearly every empire worthy of the name - from ancient Rome to the United States - has sought an Egyptian obelisk to place in the center of a ceremonial space. Obelisks - giant standing stones, invented in ancient Egypt as sacred objects - serve no practical purpose. For most of their history their inscriptions, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, were completely inscrutable. Yet over the centuries dozens of obelisks have made the voyage from Egypt to Rome, Constantinople, and Florence; to Paris, London, and New York. New obelisks and even obelisk-shaped buildings rose as well - the Washington Monument being a notable example. Obelisks, everyone seems to sense, connote some very special sort of power. This beautifully illustrated book traces the fate and many meanings of obelisks across nearly forty centuries - what they meant to Egyptians, and how other cultures have borrowed, interpreted, understood, and misunderstood them through the years.