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Jeremiah 43:13
Central Park Obelisk, New York City
Cleopatra's Needle is the popular, but inaccurate, name for each of three Ancient Egyptian obelisks re-erected in
London, Paris, and New York City during the nineteenth century. The London and New York ones are a pair, while the
Paris one comes from a different original site, where its twin remains. Although the needles are genuine Ancient
Egyptian obelisks, they are somewhat misnamed as they
have no particular connection with Queen Cleopatra VII of
Egypt, and were already over a thousand years old in her
lifetime. Both examples are made of red granite, stand
about 68 ft high, weigh about 224 tons and are inscribed
with Egyptian hieroglyphs. They were originally erected in
the Egyptian city of Heliopolis on the orders of Thutmose
III, around 1450 BC. The material of which they were cut
is granite, brought from the quarries of Aswan, near the
first cataract of the Nile. The inscriptions were added
about 200 years later by Ramesses II to commemorate his
military victories. The obelisks were moved to Alexandria
and set up in the Caesareum — a temple built by
Cleopatra in honor of Mark Antony or Julius Caesar — by
the Romans in 12 BC, during the reign of Augustus, but
were toppled some time later. This had the fortuitous
effect of burying their faces and so preserving most of the
hieroglyphs from the effects of weathering.
The New York Herald wrote at the time; "[Europe would]
point the finger of scorn at us and intimate that we could
never rise to any real moral grandeur until we had our
obelisk."
Egyptian obelisks, created from one slab of granite, were
created in honor of the Sun god, depicting one of the sun’s
“rays”.
Vatican Obelisk: Raised in the Forum Iulium in
Alexandria on Augustus's orders around 30–28 BC Brought
to Rome by Caligula in AD 37 for the spina of the Vatican
Circus.. Relocated by Pope Sixtus V in 1586; the first
monumental obelisk raised in the modern period, it is the
only obelisk in Rome that has not toppled since Roman
times. Originally created with no hieroglyphics, but since
1586 has been inscribed with a memorial to the moving of
the obelisk and exorcist formulas.