Cleopatra's Needles: Egyptian Obelisks in London and New York

Cleopatra’s Needles are a pair of red granite obelisks made for the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III and raised at the sun-temple city of Heliopolis in about 1450 BC. The Romans moved them to Alexandria in 12 BC, and in the 19th century one was shipped to London (erected 1878) and the other to New York (erected 1881). Despite their name, they have nothing to do with Cleopatra; they are among the oldest outdoor monuments in either city.

Obelisks at Heliopolis

An obelisk is a tall, four-sided stone shaft tapering to a pyramid-shaped tip, called a pyramidion. For the Egyptians it was a sacred symbol of the sun god, and pairs of obelisks usually flanked temple gateways. Heliopolis (ancient Iunu), now a suburb of Cairo, was the leading centre of sun worship and had many of them.

Both Needles were quarried from red granite at Aswan, about 800 kilometres up the Nile, cut from the bedrock in one piece and floated downstream on barges. The techniques can still be studied at the Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan, which cracked before it could be freed. The pair was erected for Thutmose III (reigned c. 1479–1425 BC), probably to mark one of his jubilee festivals, and a central column of hieroglyphs on each face records his names and titles.

About two centuries later Ramesses II, who added his name to monuments all over Egypt, had extra columns of inscription carved on either side of Thutmose’s text. Some later rulers added smaller texts as well, so each obelisk carries a layered record of royal claims.

The move to Alexandria

After Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BC, Roman emperors began removing obelisks to decorate Rome and Egypt’s new capital. In 12 BC, the 18th year of Augustus’s rule, the two Heliopolis obelisks were moved to Alexandria, the city founded by Alexander the Great (Founding of Alexandria). A Latin and Greek inscription on one of the bronze supports names the prefect of Egypt, Publius Rubrius Barbarus, and the architect Pontius.

They were set up in front of the Caesareum, a temple begun by Cleopatra VII in honour of Mark Antony or Julius Caesar and completed by Augustus as a centre of the imperial cult. Because the Greek-speaking population associated the site with the last queen, the obelisks became known in later centuries as Cleopatra’s Needles. One of them fell at some point, perhaps in an earthquake, and lay half-buried in the sand; the other remained standing.

London: the obelisk in a cylinder

In 1819 Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, presented the fallen obelisk to Britain to mark the victories of Nelson at the Nile (1798) and Abercromby at Alexandria (1801). For almost 60 years nobody paid the cost of moving it. In 1877 the dermatologist Sir Erasmus Wilson offered £10,000, and the engineer John Dixon agreed to bring it to London.

Dixon’s team, using a design by the engineer Benjamin Baker, encased the 21-metre shaft in a riveted iron cylinder, fitted it with a deck, mast and rudder, and rolled it into the sea. The odd vessel, named the Cleopatra, set out in September 1877 towed by the steamer Olga. On 14 October a storm in the Bay of Biscay left it rolling out of control. Six crewmen from the Olga who volunteered to reach it in a small boat were lost, and the cylinder was cut loose and abandoned.

The Cleopatra did not sink. It was found drifting a few days later and towed to the Spanish port of Ferrol, and in January 1878 it was finally brought up the Thames. The obelisk was raised on the newly built Victoria Embankment on 12 September 1878. A time capsule placed in the pedestal holds items such as newspapers, coins, a railway guide, photographs and copies of the Bible in several languages.

Two large bronze sphinxes designed by George John Vulliamy flank the monument, although they face inwards towards the obelisk rather than outwards as guardians would. During a German air raid on 4 September 1917, a bomb exploded nearby; the shrapnel scars are still visible on the pedestal and the right-hand sphinx and have deliberately been left unrepaired.

New York: Gorringe’s operation

The second obelisk, still standing in Alexandria, was offered to the United States by the Khedive Isma’il as relations with Western powers grew in the 1870s. The railway magnate William H. Vanderbilt paid for the move, and a US Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Henry Gorringe, directed it.

In 1879–1880 Gorringe’s team lowered the obelisk using a large pivoting iron frame, cut an opening in the hull of a steamer, the Dessoug, and slid the shaft inside. The ship reached New York in July 1880. Moving the obelisk across Manhattan to Central Park took months, using rollers on a timber trackway. It was set on its base on 22 January 1881 on a small hill behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, before a crowd of thousands in freezing weather.

The Roman bronze crabs found under the obelisk’s corners were damaged, and Gorringe had replicas cast to support it; surviving fragments of the originals went to the Metropolitan Museum. Gorringe later published a detailed account, Egyptian Obelisks (1882), describing the engineering of the move.

By the numbers

Myths and facts

Myth: Cleopatra commissioned the obelisks. Fact: they predate Cleopatra VII by over 1,400 years. Her only connection is that the Romans set them up at a temple she had begun in Alexandria.

Myth: the Paris obelisk is the third Needle. Fact: the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde came from Luxor Temple, was made for Ramesses II, and was erected in Paris in 1836. It is sometimes called a Cleopatra’s Needle informally, but it is unrelated to the Heliopolis pair.

Myth: the hieroglyphs record Cleopatra’s life. Fact: the inscriptions name Thutmose III and Ramesses II, with formulaic royal titles and dedications to the sun gods of Heliopolis.

Weathering and conservation

Both obelisks survived over 3,000 years in Egypt’s dry climate but suffered quickly in damp, polluted cities. The New York obelisk in particular lost much of the detail on some faces. In the early 1880s there was a public dispute over whether New York’s climate or Egypt’s centuries of sand and heat caused the damage, and in 1885 the shaft was coated with paraffin wax in an attempt to protect it; both climates probably played a part.

The Central Park Conservancy cleaned and laser-treated the New York obelisk in 2014, and the London Needle has also been cleaned several times. Both are listed monuments and remain popular sights.

Timeline

• c. 1450 BC: The two obelisks are erected for Thutmose III at Heliopolis.
• c. 1250 BC: Ramesses II adds his own inscriptions to the shafts.
• 12 BC: The Romans move both obelisks to the Caesareum in Alexandria.
• 1819: Muhammad Ali presents the fallen obelisk to Britain.
• 14 October 1877: The London obelisk’s cylinder is abandoned in a storm in the Bay of Biscay; six sailors die.
• 12 September 1878: The London obelisk is erected on the Victoria Embankment.
• July 1880: The New York obelisk arrives aboard the Dessoug.
• 22 January 1881: The New York obelisk is erected in Central Park.
• 4 September 1917: A German bomb damages the London pedestal and a sphinx.

Why it matters

Cleopatra’s Needles show how Egyptian monuments have been reused by successive powers, from Ramesses II to Augustus to Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America. They are genuine works of the New Kingdom standing in two modern capitals, and their journeys tell a story of engineering skill, imperial prestige and the 19th-century fascination with ancient Egypt.