Egyptian obelisk in Central Park

Episode 18 Obelisks

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

Brier devotes this entire lecture to Egyptian obelisks. Obelisk is a Greek word meaning meat skewer. In Egyptian they were known as Tekenu and in Arabic they’re called Massala (meaning needle). Made from a single shaft of pink Aswan granite (quarzite), an obelisk had to be strong enough to supports a weight of up to 1000 tons.

The first obelisks evolved from the Benben stone, a pyramidal religious monument representing the first primordial mound of earth to separate from the waters of Chaos.  Like the Benben, obelisks were associated with sun worship. Heliopolis (referred to as On in the Bible) had the most obelisks. Karnak originally had 12 (only two are left).

The earliest obelisks were built by Tuthmois I, II and I and Hatshepsut (see Egypt’s First Female Pharaoh). Ramses the Great (Ramses II) constructed more than twelve small obelisks and two huge ones (still standing) at his temple in Luxor.

To quarry an obelisk, more than 200 men stood shoulder to shoulder repeatedly dropping balls of dolerite (a harder mineral than quarzite) to hammer out a seam separating the obelisk from the bedrock. To cut away the granite under the obelisk, the men pulled dolorite balls attached to ropes back and forth on log rollers. They then loaded the obelisk onto a barge by building a canal beneath it.

It’s believed an obelisks was erected using 100 men to pull it up a 45 degree ramp with ropes.

After Rome conquered Egypt, the Roman emperor Augustus moved two obelisks from Heliopolis to Alexandria. Egypt’s remaining Luxor obelisk was re-erected in Paris in the 1830s. In the 1870s, the British re-erected one of them in London in the 1870s and  the US appropriated the other to re-erect it in New York in 1880.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/1492791/1492830