Obelisks

Ancient Egyptian obelisks stand as towering symbols of power and engineering brilliance, scattered across the world. But how were they built and what purpose did they serve? In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Steven Snape and Professor Joyce Tyldesley to uncover the incredible story of Egypt’s obelisks. From their religious significance to the astonishing feats of engineering required to carve and transport these massive stone monoliths, discover how obelisks became some of the most iconic monuments of the ancient world and why so many ended up in cities across the western world, from Rome to New York. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:36Tristan Hughes?

  This episode is sponsored by Smart Travel, a new podcast from NerdWallet. Now, you know that one friend who always finds the best travel deals, picks the right cards and somehow ends up in first class for the price of coach? Smart Travel is like that friend, but in podcast form. They cover all the things travel finance, so you can stop stressing and actually start enjoying your trips. I'm lucky enough to travel a fair bit. You might have heard me talking about being on tour with The Ancients in Australia and New Zealand quite recently. Well, Smart Travel Podcast from NerdWallet was a great help. They dig into which airport lounges are really worth it and which are just an airport

• 2:18Tristan Hughes?

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• 3:00Tristan Hughes?

  Obelisks, these great tapering stone pillars that today can be seen across the world, from New York to London to Rome to Egypt. And it was ancient Egypt that was the origin point for these iconic monuments. That is what we're going to be exploring today: the story of obelisks in ancient Egypt. Why they were built, how they were built, and how popular these monuments became for people throughout history. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Joining me today are Dr Stephen Snape and Professor Joyce Tyldesley, two wonderful Egyptologists who are also husband and wife.

• 3:45Tristan Hughes?

  Now, every once in a while, we release special episodes that feature not one but two interviewees, and Joyce and Stephen felt like a great combination to talk about obelisks. What they are, why the ancient Egyptians built them, and, perhaps most interestingly of all, how they went about building them. As you're about to hear, there's some really interesting information surviving from Egypt that has revealed these amazing insights into how these great monuments were created and how big a task it was. I really do hope you enjoy.

• 4:22Tristan Hughes?

  Stephen, Joyce, it is a pleasure to have you both on the podcast for the first time ever, the husband and wife of Egyptology, welcome.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  Thank you, good to be here.

• 4:31Tristan Hughes?

  The topic we're talking about today is obelisks. We've done the Great Pyramid with yourself before, Joyce, we've covered ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses, but I've always been fascinated by obelisks because in Britain at least, you always seem to see them in every village, town and city today, but their origin point is ancient Egypt, thousands of years ago.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. They're a classic Egyptian artefact. You know, if you think about ancient Egypt, you think about pyramids and you think about obelisks. And yes, but actually, people don't know a great deal about them, they're well worth exploring.

• 5:06Tristan Hughes?

  And so what do we mean by an obelisk? No such thing is a silly question. I mean, what kind of shape should we be thinking of?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Okay, well, the classic obelisk has a square base, it is tall, tapers very slightly as it goes up, then dramatically goes to a point at the top in a small pyramid or pyramidian. So you should be thinking of something which is classically very tall, has four distinct sides, which in most cases were decorated with either scenes or more particularly Egyptian hieroglyphs, which tell us a bit about who built them and what they were for.

• 5:43Tristan Hughes?

  And is that tapering? Is that an important part of the whole process?

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Another important part is it's made from one block of stone in its classical form. I mean, today, people build things out of masonry and call it an obelisk, but in ancient Egypt, it would be one block of stone.

• 6:03Tristan Hughes?

  And in regards to that, would they vary, I'm guessing, in their height, the kind of mathematical proportions behind them? If you want a taller obelisk, would the ancient Egyptian architect or whoever have to think more about the kind of proportions and how high they can go and how much the taper would be and how much weight the square base could have? I'm guessing there's a lot of thought behind that, the kind of how tall your obelisk could be?

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think that's right. I mean, it's, it is a critical thing. Because the idea seems to be for the classic obelisks, the really big ones that stood up in front of temples. The idea is that they're probably as big as you can get them. But the problem with that is you're dealing with a huge and heavy piece of stone, which is nonetheless quite thin. So it's, it's got problems in terms of transporting it, putting it up in place. It's something which is, you know, there's a bit of a paradox in a, in a way that it's something which is huge and heavy, yet also really quite fragile. So, yeah, when it comes to planning the size of the obelisk,

• 7:06Speaker 04

  the sort of factors which need to be borne in mind is, yeah, get it as big as you can. But make sure it's not so tall that it becomes too narrow. And therefore you've got problems of it, of it perhaps snapping or breaking as you're transporting the thing. So, yeah, I think, I think it needs a lot of, lot of thought, particularly, as I say, for the, for the classic really big ones, which were designed to be seen for you know, huge, huge distances and erected in front of temples.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, because if you're a king who wants to erect an obelisk, um, you're doing this to show that you have absolute control over your environment and your workers, everything. So you absolutely do want to have it as big as you can get it. Because you want to impress everybody. But as Stephen says, there's a huge problems involved in this. You just can't go on infinitely up. It would be very, very difficult indeed, especially to transport it and erect it.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's an important point, the idea that this is something which is built by a king to, to impress people. It's, it's, I think, I think part of the, the idea of it being a really difficult thing to do because of those technical problems. It's part of the allure in the way that a king who can do this is effectively saying, you know, look at me, I'm so powerful. I can do something which is really, really difficult. But I'm doing it for, for a number of reasons. In particular, I'm doing it for, for, for gobs. And also to show my own power. So the fact that it is a really difficult thing to do is, is part of the whole idea.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  And of course, if you can do it, it shows that you have the support of the gods, because the gods have helped you to do it. So by actually doing it, you're enforcing not only your own power and logistical power, if you like, your command over the resources of Egypt, but you're also showing that the gods are on your side. Because if they didn't want you to be able to erect it, you wouldn't be able to do it.

• 9:00Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you guys have brilliantly kind of preempted my next question. That was going to be, I mean, why did the ancient Egyptians build obelisks? But from what you were saying there about, you know, the pharaoh projecting their power, but also their proximity to the gods as well. I mean, was that just one reason as to why the ancient Egyptians built obelisks? Were there people who weren't pharaohs who built obelisks and they wanted to do it for other reasons? Were there more than one reason sometimes as to why an obelisk would be built in ancient Egypt?

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Well, yes, there are multiple layers of reasons why you would build an obelisk. And the ones that we're really talking about at the moment, or have so far, are the the classic, really big ones, you know, the ones which are 20 metres plus, that go up in front of temples. Some really quite small ones will be put in front of tombs by private individuals. But they all seem to have the basic idea is that they're connected to the sun god. Because although I've been talking about, we've been talking about them in terms of really difficult things kings can do and to impress people with their power, they do have really quite specific, again, I'm talking about the big ones, really specific

• 10:10Speaker 04

  localities which are in front of temples, but especially temples which are connected to sun gods. And that means that the really big ones only actually appear in two locations in Egypt. One is Heliopolis, near Cairo, which was the ancient centre of the sun god Ra, and the other in the south of Egypt, at Thebes, modern Luxor, where you have the temple of Amun Ra, who is also an important sun god. So the really big ones that we see both still standing today, and more particularly which have been taken down and erected other places, the big ones came from those two locations, because they were so intimately

• 10:55Speaker 04

  connected with the sun. And the obelisk itself can be seen as, as a solar symbol, as if you like. Well, two things. One, it's the rays of the sun shining down on the earth and, and the obelisk is Is that idea of something intangible made solid? But also, it's something which allows the kings to show that they're in contact with the gods. Because they're creating something which can reach up and touch the sky. And we know this, and we know this because they tell us. The reason we know so much about obelisks compared to, you know, other standing stones that you get in different parts of the world, is they're covered in text and they tell us what they're there for.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  And that, that solar connection, the connection to the sun is absolutely vital when it comes to creating those big obelisks.

• 11:42Tristan Hughes?

  I didn't realise that it was just kind of Luxor and Heliolopolis as those main areas. Do we know of many big obelisks that have survived? I mean, I mean, can we count them in, on two hands? Or were there many big ancient Egyptian obelisks in those two locations?

• 11:59Speaker 03

  There weren't that many, but there were quite a few. But the first thing to remember is that they come in pairs. So you wouldn't always raise one obelisk. Quite a few people did two. So, so that, that confuses it. And you get some pharaohs, like the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. She raised at least four and she then tried to do an absolutely massive one. We think it was her. What we have is in a quarry at Aswan, the broken remains of an obelisk that would have been the tallest one to be raised in Egypt, had it not cracked in half, which must have been really, really, really frustrating to everybody concerned. So you have some, some people who raised several. You have some people who raise, as far as we know, just one.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  And lots of pharaohs, of course, don't raise any. But they have, as Stephen said, they've been dispersed. The Romans in particular were very keen on, on obelisks and they moved them around. So they moved them around within Egypt. So for example, the two obelisks that we now call Cleopatra's Needles. There's one in New York and there's one in London. They're not connected to Cleopatra in any way, but they were brought from Alexandria. Because that's where they were standing at the time that they were found, but they weren't raised in Alexandria. So we have these obelisks sort of slightly moving around and the Romans in particular, moved a lot of Egyptian obelisks to Rome. So there are quite a few actually in Rome.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you have to, you have to look all around the world to count them.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, in fact, there are a lot more standing in Rome than there are in Egypt. In Egypt, there are just, of the big ones, there are four still standing in Egypt. In Rome, there are over a dozen, not all of them the very big ones, but as Joyce says, they moved around quite a bit. And some just seem to have disappeared. As Joyce said, Hachepset says she raised four, two of them with no idea where they are. King Amenhotep III, who is one of the great kings, he would expect to have raised obelisks. And we know from other texts connected to quarries that he did have several, perhaps somewhere between six and eight obelisks. Um, with no idea where they are. So some may have collapsed and still need to be discovered.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Some, as Joyce said, have been transported to other places. Some may have been reinscribed by later kings because that's always a possibility. Because some obelisks that we have have inscriptions of several kings and some they may know bones about it. Another big obelisk erecting king, Thutmose III, he seems to have started several that weren't finished. In fact, one which was erected by one of his successors, Thutmose IV. He says he found it, it had been lying around in a quarry for decades and he just finished it off and put it up. So some of these obelisks have quite complicated histories in terms of who started them, who finished them. Then subsequently been transported to several different locations.

• 14:59Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you mentioned there in that answer, I mean, earlier on, talking about ancient Rome and how these obelisks, I mean, they have spread much further beyond Egypt over the past few hundred years, and indeed also in antiquity too with the Romans. But before we get to that part of the story, I'd like us to go back to the whole building process. Because you also mentioned in passing, I mean, these quarries and this location of Azwan. So what is this place called Azwan and why is it so intertwined as this origin point in ancient Egyptian history for the building of obelisks?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Aswan is the traditional southern border of Egypt, so it's as far away from the northern sides that you could, you would expect to go down the Nile without being interrupted with cataracts. So it's a long way away from Heliopolis and it's quite a long way away from Thebes as well. But it has hard stone. Egypt has building stone, it's got limestone and it's got sandstone, limestone in the north and sandstone further to the south. But it doesn't have a lot of this hard stones distributed throughout the land. So if you want to build an obelisk, you need hard stone. And so you have to go to these quarries, which causes of course all sorts of problems. Because once you've cut your obelisk, you've got to transport it.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  But that's where they went to and the quarry's there. They still survive, you can still see how rock was cut out. As I said, you can see the unfinished obelisk still in place, which is really helpful because it gives us a really good idea as to how these things were cut out of the rock. Because of course granite is extremely hard, very difficult to work. And these quarries, it wouldn't have been pleasant working conditions, it would have been hot, it would have been dry, it would have been dusty. But we think we know fairly well how they actually managed to cut them out of the rock.

• 16:50Tristan Hughes?

  And before we get to that, I mean, so granite, that is the type of hard stone that they have got in Aswan. Is it red granite that I've got in my notes?

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there are a series of hard stones at Aswan because it is the cataracts of the Nile, which are formed of various, you know, igneous stones. Granite is the classic one there and it's targeted partly because it is so hard and because, as Joey said, Egyptians are plenty of building stone, sandstone and limestone. But you're not going to be able to create something, as we said earlier, so tall and thin, without the risk of cracking with those sort of stones. So you need something which is very, very hard. Although part of the problem comes with granite is also, also very brittle. But at the same time, one of the important things about granite, as you said, is its colour.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  There are different types of granite, but the red granite is the classic one. And that's a stone which Is associated with the sun. There are a number of coloured stones that the Egyptians associated with. If you like, solidified sunlight is one way of putting it. Another one is red quartzite, which is found in the north, but that's much more granular stone. The other good thing about granite is of course, if you can work it properly, you can get for a very smooth finish, which which is perfect for inscribing high quality hieroglyphic texts. So for those reasons, granite is the ideal stone. But then that gives you problems about how do you get the thing out of the ground? How do you create something from something which is so intractable material?

• 18:23Tristan Hughes?

  What do we know then about the tools? If you're a worker in one of these quarries, or you're overseeing these workers and you get an order from the pharaoh wanting a new big, you know, state of the art obelisk? I mean, what tools have you got at your disposal with your workers to try and then carve out one of these monster monuments?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Well, not much at all. You're not going to be able to use chisels and saws to any great effect on granite. It's quite hard. It looks as if the way it was done is that it was marked out in the ground. So you'd you'd you'd mark out your obelisk and then you would clear what would be the top surface of the obelisk. And then you'd work down the sides to sort of cut out the shape. But the way you would do that is to get an even harder stone, a stone ball, and just basically use it as a hammer or a hammerstone, either to hit it or to just drop it onto the ground. And eventually, with a lot of manpower and a lot of hours doing it, you would be able to to cut down alongside the the obelisk shape that you want.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Once you've got, if you've been able to go down the side, then you have to undercut it, which must have been terrible. You'd have to be, I think, swinging it or harnessing your your diorite stone balls to to hit it. And you would have to start packing it at the same time to make sure it didn't collapse. And eventually you would end up if you did this with um an obelisk resting on stone pillars. You would leave some pillars in place, but unpacking as well. And eventually then you would knock away, well, it sounds quite quick, but it wouldn't be. You you would cut away your stone pillars and you would end up with your obelisks lying in a trench. That you're working in the trench round it with packing round it as well. And then you have the problem of lifting it out, which is a whole new problem, but it's not a fast process.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  But having said that, you know, Hatshepsut cut four or five. It's it's perhaps faster than we imagine that it that it would have been.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  The key issue here is, as as Joe said, is is there's no real super sophisticated technological fix here. There's no, you know, super material they're using. It's just these hard dolerite balls that they find in the eastern desert, which is just a stone that's harder than granite. And as Joe said, you'd just get loads of people and bash away at it. And that's that's that's that's the only way to deal with a stone which is which is so hard, find something a bit harder and just walk away till you release it. But again, as Joe said, if you get large numbers of people involved, you could do it relatively quickly. I mean, Hatshepsut herself says on the inscription on the base of her obelisk that it was seven months in the quarries.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  So she says when she started, when she finished, and it was seven months, which isn't too bad really, considering, you know, you're dealing with a an obelisk which is, you know, say thirty metres in in in height and it's made out of granite. And I guess part of the problem is getting people around it. You know, getting, you know, as Joey said, you've got these trenches and you're just bashing them out. It's getting enough people in that in that space and just having them all day, every day whacking the ground with these these heavy stone balls.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, you've got to cut a trench big enough to fit people in. So it's not just cutting the obelisk that's the problem. It's cutting the trench around the obelisk. As you can't just do a thin cut, he's got to be quite wide.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  And of course, you've got to leave. Enough room so you can move the obelisk out. Yes. You can't have an obelisk at the bottom of a trench because there's no way you're going to be able to lift it straight up. You're going to need to have some clearance so effectively you can roll it away from the quarry and down presumably down to the river where you've got Burgess waiting for it.

• 22:17Speaker 01

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• 22:52Speaker 05

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• 23:49Tristan Hughes?

  What is quite interesting to me, and this is a very, I guess it's perhaps a bit of a different angle, and it's nowhere near the same size, I think, but it's still an interesting kind of activity that would have included Lots of workers is that I went to Orkney a couple of years ago. And I was at the Ring of Brodgar and learning about where they got those standing stones from, which was from a quarry, which was some seven kilometres away. And we went to that quarry where they found it, including you can go to that hillside and see the remains of an unfinished. Standing stone that never made it out of the quarry, similar to this unfinished obelisk you find as well. But hearing about that in the Stone Age, some five thousand years ago, how they also just used a big hammerstone and just hit away at it.

• 24:32Tristan Hughes?

  At the kind of horizontal block of stone on the hillside until it gave way. And then moved it down. It's funny how with the ancient Egyptians as well, it's a similar kind of thing, just bashing it out for a long time, which also makes me think. Of the noise, if you were travelling down the river Nile and pass that, you'd be able to hear the work of these workers, you know, from dawn till dusk, just. Hitting the your stone against the red granite for days and days on end. It must have been quite something just to hear.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But what you're saying is it really touches on something which is, I think, important for the whole idea of. Technology and building in ancient Egypt, not just obelisk, but also temples and pyramids as well. But on the one hand, clearly there's a high level of technical sophistication in terms of of planning and architecture and so forth. But at the other hand, you've just got the application of brute labour force in having huge numbers of people to drag stones about and huge numbers of people just. Bash away. And I think when people, you know, think about ancient Egyptian technology, think, how did the Egyptians do this? They, you know, what tools they have or machines that they have, which we don't have anymore and.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  And what secret knowledge has been lost? It's not that at all. Yes, there's technological sophistication, but on the other hand, it is just. The ability of the state, particularly the king, to get loads of people in the right place and get them to do what is, you know, grunt work. And that's that's the secret to lots of lots of these really quite astonishing achievements the Egyptians are able to bring off.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. People, people are always looking for some, you know, alien technology or help from Atlantis or something to explain how the Egyptians could do this stuff. But actually, if you have enough people, the technologies can be quite simple. You just have to repeat it over and over and over again and to be prepared to finance that and, and they could do it.

• 26:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, whilst we're on this, shall we also address that other thing that is regularly repeated? Do we think this workforce would have been slaves? I mean, what will we know about the workforce that were making these obelisks?

• 26:47Speaker 04

  We don't know very much about the workforce itself. We know, we know a fair bit about the, the people who are in charge of it. Because they left graffiti at the, at the quarries themselves. You know, they, they, they wrote hieroglyphic inscriptions, saying, you know, I was sent to, to get these obelisks. So, so we know quite a bit about those people. In terms of the, the labour force itself, I don't think we should be thinking about slaves. But I think we should, for the nature of this job, be thinking about impressed labour. In the New Kingdom, when most of these obelisks were created, quite a lot of the punishment for criminals

• 27:26Speaker 04

  was to send them off to unpleasant tasks. The classic one is being sent south into Nubia to work on the gold mines, which must have been really, really grim. But I imagine this is the sort of thing that you might get criminals working on as well as a bit of local impressed labour. We do have other texts from the same, roughly the same period. There's one of Seti the first who goes off to do a bit of gold mining and setting up temples in the desert. And it talks about the hundreds of people who went with that. And in passing, they note that several hundred of them just died. So we're talking about labour, some of which is, is dispensable. So one, one thinks of in terms of criminals

• 28:07Speaker 04

  in that sort of way. We don't, as far as I'm aware, have evidence for the sort of Thing which is going on when when they're building pyramids where where you have quite a lot of, again, it's it's it's compulsory labour, but it's, you know, but you get people from all over Egypt being called upon the korve for labour taxation, in effect. So you'll go from your village and you'll go to the pyramid site and you'll work there for a few months and then and having paid your dues, you'll you'll then go home. We don't, we don't have that sort of evidence for for for obelisk building. But but I guess perhaps it was a bit more, you know, not so much a long term, permanent thing

• 28:46Speaker 04

  as as pyramid building projects were. So you, so you wouldn't need long term labour at the site. So so perhaps thinking about it as being criminals or a bit of, bit of local labour being impressed to do it might be the way of thinking about it. But honestly, we don't have those sort of records which allow us to be absolutely precise about that.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  It's interesting because we do have records of some criminal trials and we can see that the processes, if you're found guilty, you're not sent off to jail to do nothing. You will be used and you'll be sent off, like Stephen said, to the gold mines or to the quarries or whatever. And it's, I think for many people, it must have been a death sentence. It must have been absolutely horrific. I mean, there's also the possibility at some times of using prisoners of war to also work in the quarries. Yeah, I don't think you'd get many people wanting to work there unless they're in an administrative capacity. Yeah, really hard.

• 29:39Tristan Hughes?

  And you also mentioned in passing there, so New Kingdom Egypt. So that's the time, you mentioned names like Hatshepsut and Seti the First. Perhaps also names like Tutankhamun, isn't it? So that's mid to late second millennium B C, more than three thousand years ago. Is that the period of time that we should be imagining that these quarries at Hazwan, building obelisks, creating obelisks, that's when they were doing the most of that? That was almost kind of the zenith point of building these great monuments?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Yes, and that's also the time that they're starting to really enhance the Karnak Temple at the same time. So the two are kind of going hand in hand. There's a lot of building work going on in Thebes. It's less easy to see what's happening in Heliopolis, but yes, that's right.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there are clearly some earlier obelisks. So the the the earliest big obelisk that we've got is is this Senwazret, the first obelisk at at Heliopolis. And he's of early Middle Kingdom, so several centuries earlier.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  We don't seem to have much more big obelisk building for the rest of the Middle Kingdom. Although it may be that we've got obelisks that have just disappeared, as Joyce said, Heliopolis is in a really poor condition as an archaeological site and there may be earlier Middle Kingdom stuff there. But like Joyce said, in the New Kingdom where you get Karnak Temple expanding, we get Heliopolis expanding even more, those are the real high points of obelisk building. But also, we're dealing with very powerful rulers, the kings of the 18th Dynasty and the early part of the 19th Dynasty, these are the ones who were able to control significant amount of resources. And yeah, in the Old Kingdom,

• 31:25Speaker 04

  we've got kings who were controlling lots of resources, otherwise we wouldn't have pyramids at places like Giza. In the New Kingdom, they're employing those resources in slightly different ways and not in the royal team itself, but largely in temple building and the obelisks go along as part of that. And the connection to the sun god as well is a strand which runs all the way through. So they want to show the piety towards the sun god, but with the expansion of Thebes, of Karnak as becoming a place which is really developing in a big way as a centre for a sun god, in addition to what's always been the case at Heliopolis. Yeah, there's the potential for lots of places where people

• 32:08Speaker 04

  who have got those resources and the ability to control those resources are able to do that and want to do that.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Also, you get a sense of almost competition within the family as well, that once one has started to do it, the next one has to do it, but do it better.

• 32:24Tristan Hughes?

  Your obelisk is bigger and better than yours, right?

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. So I am a bigger and better king who is favoured more by the gods and more powerful. But Chepsa actually tells us that her father told her to build obelisks and he, Thutmose the first, also raised obelisk at Karnak Temple. So it seems to be a family thing, particularly the Thutmose families are very keen on doing this. They are very keen on the Karnak Temple complex and enhancing it.

• 32:50Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you mentioned Karnak Temple complex there. So if we keep on as one for the moment, but think about, let's say Karnak temples and 3,000 years ago in the New Kingdom at Luxor, which is, you know, ancient Thebes as the destination. If we continue with that whole process from obelisk being made at the quarry to ultimately being erected at Karnak Temple, we've got to the stage where the workforce have used those great hammer stones to hammer out the shape of the obelisk and then cut away those kind of stone pillars beneath. But I mean, surely there's more to do before moving it to the river then. I mean, I look at an obelisk today and I look at the sides and they're incredibly smooth sides, aren't

• 33:31Tristan Hughes?

  they? So isn't there, if you're just using stones, surely all four sides, it's still quite a rough design. Do they do the next part, the kind of refining of it at the quarry as well? And then the decorations? What do we know about that?

• 33:44Speaker 04

  It's a really good question, the extent to which the finished at the quarry itself. On one level, you might expect that to be relatively limited in as much as if you are transporting this thing, you know, you're dragging it to the river to put it on the barge. And once you've unloaded it at the other end, there's going to be lots of manhandling and maneuvering and dragging around. So you wouldn't expect the finish to be that smooth. On the other hand, you don't really want to have a lot of work on site once you've erected it. You don't want to put up something which is rough and then have the issue of smoothing it off all the way down. It's a difficult one. The best evidence, well, one point of

• 34:28Speaker 04

  evidence we have is in the temple of Adaral Bakri of Hacchepsat, where she illustrates the moving of obelisks. And the ones on those are depicted as though they are finished. But whether that's artistic license, so you can see on the picture what it is that's been shown or not is unclear. So I think that's a really good question. I think a significant amount of finishing has to take place before you erect it. But probably the final finishing itself is carried on once you've got the obelisk up. The other thing that we haven't mentioned about these things is that the the really big ones, the really important ones, had significant amounts of gold covering them.

• 35:13Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, okay.

• 35:14Speaker 04

  Whether it was the whole thing, or whether it's just the top half, is a subject of much debate because none of it survived anymore. It's been stripped off in the past, but significant amounts of gold would have been put on these things. And of course, that can really only happen, the plating of the obelisk, once you've, once you've got it up. So the, well, once, I think you, I think the shortened, I suppose, in a sense, unsatisfactory answer is I expect as much as could be done before it was erected was done. Because everything's going to get more difficult once the thing's up in place and you'd have to erect scaffolding around it to work on it. And you want to do that as little as possible.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, particularly as they're right in front of temples. There is not a lot of room runs these once they're erected. And also, um, the procession of the obelisk, because it makes its way towards the temple and is raised is a sort of, is a very big event. Um, her chapstick again, she illustrates this in her mortuary temple. You can, you can see that the, the barges are processing with the boats on them and so on, and people are cheering and then they arrive and then she dedicates them to her father. So you probably want it to look quite respectable when it arrives. But again, it's difficult to tell from the art, of course, because they, they show us what they want us to see. They don't necessarily show it as it was, but I would imagine, unlike maybe a sculpture where you might be tempted to do more finishing touches when it's in its final location.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  With an obelisk, you might do perhaps more before it, it gets to the temple.

• 36:37Tristan Hughes?

  So you mentioned being, being dragged onto boats. So are we thinking like rollers? We have lots of workers trying to make them get down to a river and then they're loaded on or with, with cranes or something onto big kind of barges that could handle the weight. I mean, what do we know about that part?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Well, I, I think what you would do is you would try to get the water as close to the obelisk and the quarry as you can. So if you could cut a canal that went straight to the obelisk, that would be ideal. It's not always going to be possible. It's going to be transported by water. If they didn't have the Nile, they wouldn't be able to do this. It couldn't be done over land. It needs to be water transported. But having said that, even that is a very complicated process because you have to have big barges. And Egypt doesn't have big trees to make big barges from, so you have to get hold of wood probably from Lebanon. To be able to build your barges. So it's another logistical aspect to it. You've got to have enough rope. You've got to have wood possibly for for sledges and things to help.

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Or make rolling roller type devices as well. Well, you definitely need. Wood for the barges and then of course you need the boats that are going to tow the barges as well. So it's not just the man force and the quarry. All this has to be. Planned as well and it would be very expensive to to create a boat like that. How they got them on to the the barges, we're not quite sure, but it seems to be. A question of basically you get the the boat as close as possible and then you you wait the boat down. So that um so that it's low in the water by putting stones in it heavier than the obelisk. And then you have the the obelisk, you've undercut the obelisk if you can do.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  You raise the boat up under the obelisk and and sort of manage to get it on to it that by by removing the the ballast that you've put on to the boat. I'm being a bit vague about this because nobody really knows. It's things that people have tried. People have described it. The Romans have described doing this and people who've moved them in modern times or fairly modern times have also described how they do it. And it seems to be pretty much the same process. But it it's not at all simple to do. So that in its own right, you it would be so awful if you got your obelisk and then it ended up on the in the, you know, the. The river, that would be terrible.

• 38:48Tristan Hughes?

  Can you imagine if there are some obelisks actually at the bottom of the River Nile that just, you know. The barge just collapsed or something like that. And then that poor person has got to go to the fair and say, sorry, we've lost your obelisk in the River Nile.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  It wouldn't surprise me the slightest if there were plenty, there there are just one. I mean, what what Joyce has just pointed out is one of the things about the technology of obelisk. Is there are things that we know and there are things that we definitely don't know and we know they use barges because they depict. A chap that shows us these big barges being towed by tow boats and the obelisks are on them. Exactly how the obelisk are on them is a matter of some debate, but we know they had barges. We know that because of the size of the things, it has to be, you have to minimise. The trans the travel over land as much as possible because that's going to be really, really difficult.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  So we know they have barges, that much is clear, exactly as Joy said, how they got them on the barges, we have to speculate. And what we speculate even more is how they got them off and got the obelisks up in their final location. And that we absolutely don't know.

• 39:56Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, so that was gonna be my next thing, was gonna be like, once they've got it to the site, then they've got to get it ninety degrees. Well, they've got to erect it, don't they? They've got to get it absolutely straight. And that is something, I guess, almost like people think about how they built the pyramids. I mean, it's another kind of mathematical brilliance, I guess, the kind of equations that you need to try and get it completely straight. And then stay there, keep it steady.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yes, and unfortunately, I've mentioned, Stevens mentioned that her chap, so it does illustrate the cutting of her first two obelisks to a certain extent. And they're on the Amurtra Temple walls, but she doesn't show these vital bits, possibly because she would expect everybody to know them and didn't find them at all interesting. So we're sort of left floundering a bit. Not everything she shows us is entirely accurate. For example, if you look at her barges, it looks like that she's got ultra-long barges and has got two obelisks end to end, which is almost certainly not how you would transport them. But I think she's doing that so you can see there are two obelisks, because if you showed one behind the other, it wouldn't be as obvious. But if only she'd shown actually the erecting of these things. Again, people have experimented in modern times to try and do it.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  And the idea is that basically you dig a pit and you use ramps and you slowly, slowly tip the obelisk up. But again, as I think I've already said, it's made so much harder because you're erecting it in front of a temple that's already there. So you can't have it over the, I don't know if this would ever happen, if you're overbalanced and went into the temple, that would be really, really difficult as well.

• 41:23Tristan Hughes?

  That wouldn't be good, no, you'd have questions to answer there, I think, in the dozen.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  You have to be fairly accurate with what you're doing. And I think possibly that would be the hardest part of the whole process is to get it up. And once it's up, it's probably fairly stable if you've put a pit there, a pit full of sand and rocks that you're slowly removing. And you're using ramps as well, because the Egyptians are very good at building ramps. But yeah, an amazing feat. I mean, people have suggested all sorts of weird things like kites and water power and so on. But there's no evidence for anything other than manpower and very basic engineering knowledge, which they're great at.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, the important thing is the use of ramps. We know that the Egyptians used ram, simple ramps for lots of really huge building projects, pyramids, temples. And for those things, it's really straightforward because the idea is you're getting a stone up in the air and putting it on top of other stones. So, you know, that's, that's straightforward. The problem with the obelisk is you've got this, this long, thin thing and you've got to get it upright the right way around. So how are you going to do that? Well, the idea is you pull it up, up, up a ramp, which is fine. You've got it elevated over the base because you've got the base there. Quite a small target to hit, but then you've got to get, get it down the other side of

• 42:39Speaker 04

  the ramp and hit that base almost vertically. And again, it has to be supported. You can't, we're back to this thing. It's, it's huge and heavy, but it's fragile. You don't want to leave bits of it unsupported because the chances are it's going to snap under its own weight. So you've got to drag it up a ramp. You've got to somehow get it to come down the other side of the ramp, um, yet still be supported and hit that target and then be somehow adjusted into place. So it's an amazing technical achievement, as I said, that they're hitting that target. But exactly how it's done, we simply don't know.

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• 44:37Tristan Hughes?

  I think you guys have brilliantly talked through that whole process and it's such an extraordinary part of the obelisk's story, the kind of erection of one, you know, hundreds of miles away from the quarry that it was created in. I will also kind of use as a bit of an Easter egg, maybe, or for anyone listening who will be planning to go to Karnak Temple in the future, because I remember being shown this a couple of years ago when I went. I think it's in just before the hyper-style hall. If you go to the left, you can see the tip of an obelisk that is on its side. And if you look very, very closely, this comes back to the point you mentioned earlier, Stephen, is you might be able to see what almost looks like drill holes in the tip of the obelisk. Those holes were for then putting on top the golden tips or the

• 45:22Tristan Hughes?

  metal tips, do we think? And you have it right there. You can see at Karnak, like, the tip of an obelisk up close and see where, kind of how they would have then applied that gold on top to make it shine in the sky.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And not just the tip, on the upper part as well. As I say, it's a matter of some debate as to how much of the shaft was covered in gold, but at least the top half was. And part of the reason we know this, yes, you're quite right, they've got these holes for attachment of gold plate. But also, on the obelisk themselves, they talk about it. And in the descriptions, they say things like, "These were covered, these things were covered in gold, so that they will reflect the rays of the sun and light up the two lands when the sun hits them." So they're very much, you know, we're going back again to this idea that they're connected with the sun and sunlight, that the idea is that, yes, these things are covered in gold, they're

• 46:18Speaker 04

  very visible, they're very impressive. But also at the same time, the sun is is radiating from them as it hits these things. So again, it it it ups the level of of how impressive these things are and how much they are connected to to to to the sun, that they're linking heaven and earth. That's one of the things they're doing.

• 46:38Tristan Hughes?

  The two lands, are they Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt?

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. So essentially by two lands, they say the whole of Egypt. Now, that's obviously a bit of an exaggeration, but these things would have been visible from considerable distances.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  It's kind of a reminder that we've been talking about the technology, which is really important. But the whole thing is, it's also a religious right, if you like, cutting the obelisk and transporting and everything. It's all a religious offering to the gods. So and we tend to sort of overlook that aspect of it. But that's a really important aspect of it too, to the Egyptians, to get that aspect of it right.

• 47:19Tristan Hughes?

  If we now move on to the last part of the chat and kind of focus more on the legacy of these obelisks, of these monuments. If we first of all keep in antiquity, how did other ancient civilizations, I mean, how were they influenced by by these structures that would have, I mean, word would have spread about their creation, what they looks like. I went to Petra recently and they have these kind of stone similar designs to obelisks on some of their tombs and on high points, but I think they're called nepheshes. Obviously, you've got the Kingdom of Kush further south in Sudan, don't they, which have a heavy influence from Egypt? I mean, does the idea of the obelisk, does it get transported far and wide across the ancient world?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  I think it's really difficult to tell to a certain level because a column is a column and lots of civilizations have columns. So I think we have to be careful not to imagine that everything that is long and thin is directly influenced by the Egyptians. But it's clear, I mean, certainly Egypt towards the end of the dynastic age was ruled by Nubian pharaohs who took the obelisk back home. So yes, that that is a clear evidence of Influence there. Neighboring obelisk-like structures, are they influenced by the Egyptians but have a different meaning? Are they obelisks? Are they a form of column? It's really difficult to tell.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  But what we can tell is that the Romans were very, very struck by obelisks. And they took them back to Rome with a lot of difficulty and it's it's they too actually regard the ability to raise an obelisk, even though they've not cut it. It again shows that they are a powerful ruler too. Um. They're they're using it for exactly the same purpose. They're not necessarily using it to worship the sun. But in that aspect of it, to demonstrate how great they are, they're doing that too. And then from people are picking this up from Rome, the Romans then also start occasionally making their own obelisks. And it sort of radiates out from there, I would suggest.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  And then we get another phase later of people, uh when people start to travel to Egypt again, picking up on the idea of the obelisk. And you get it again, becoming important in the West.

• 49:35Tristan Hughes?

  Do you then see that? I mean, after Alexander the Great, we'll get to the Romans and absolutely as kind of almost going full circle. From the beginning of our chat, when you mentioned obelisks in Rome. But of course, following Alexander the Great, you also have the Hellenistic Greeks in charge of Egypt as well with the Ptolemaic dynasty. Ultimately ending with um the famous figure of Cleopatra. Are they also interested in these obelisks? You know, these things that they see in front of these old temples and also with the Ptolemies really kind of wanting to show themselves, yes, Greek on one hand, but also kind of respecting Egyptian culture and portraying themselves as traditional Egyptian pharaohs similar to Tutankhamun. Are they also interested in obelisks too before the Romans arrive?

• 50:17Speaker 03

  They're certainly interested in ancient Egyptian culture. It's funny because you know, the film, the Cleopatra film with Elizabeth Taylor and and the way it's been filmed, that ancient Alexandria is dotted about with random Egyptian artefacts. And people used to laugh at that. But the more excavation that's been doing in Alexandria, particularly in the harbour, underwater excavation. It's becoming clear that actually, yes, they did move genuine Egyptian already to them ancient artefacts to their new city of Alexandria.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  But there's no real evidence that I know of that they were particularly interested in obelisks.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  There are Ptolemaic obelisks, but they're small ones. They're not interested in in creating huge ones, whether that's because they're not interested, because they're not able to, for whatever reason.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  And they're.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  But it doesn't seem to be something that does interest them. There are small ones that they put up in front of temples and you've got things like the Kingston Lacy Obelisk.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Helps with.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  You know, because it's got Ptolemaic names on it, it helps with translation of hieroglyphs. So there are obelisks, but not the big ones.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  No, no, the the big traditions. I think they would struggle as well if you're based in Alexandria. It's a big ask to get an obelisk. It could be done, but.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we we we we do have some obelisks moving around at that time. And I think, as you say, in Alexandria, we do have some sort of genuine pharaonic monuments, including the movement of of obelisks, although the main ones that move there seem to be during the Roman period. You know, Augustus moves obelisks to Alexandria. But they don't really seem that interested in in obelisks compared to what was going on in the New Kingdom.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  I mean, they're not that interested in ancient Egyptian religion, the Ptolemies particularly, are they? They they have their own variants. So it might just not chime necessarily with what they want to use it for, but they're quite capable of taking it and using it in a different way.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, another way of thinking about it is in the Ptolemaic period, you don't get really very much expansion at Karnak. You don't seem to have very much going on at Heliopolis. So those traditional ancient religious sites don't seem to interest them quite as much as as other places.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  No, they've they've changed the religion to fit with their own particular beliefs and it seems like the obelisk is not that important, even though it's a shape. They might use it. They're not using it in the same way, I don't think.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  No.

• 52:34Tristan Hughes?

  So we get to the Romans and, as you mentioned, so they like moving some of these obelisks around. And a few of them are taken to Rome. Is it both big and small are taken to Rome? Because my mind will think, having done a previous interview about this, about the Great Circus Maximus, the the chariot racing hub of the Roman world, and I think almost as a symbol of their annexation of Egypt.

• 52:59Tristan Hughes?

  By Octavian, later the Emperor Augustus, that they have obelisks in the central area of the Circus Maximus too. So if you were a Roman walking through ancient Rome in, let's say, the second century AD, would you see ancient Egyptian obelisks of all shapes and sizes? Well, not shapes, but of various sizes?

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Yes, you would. I think probably the bigger ones are the ones that you'd see primarily. Because as you say, I think they're being taken there as a symbol of Roman domination over Egypt. There's quite a lot goes on there in the Augustan and Giulio Claudian period. Yeah, Circus Maximus, also the Campus Martius, where one seems to be put up like an enormous sun dial. You know, I mean, literally, there's an enormous sun dial that ground is laid out to look like that, which is an interesting afterlife of it as a solar symbol. And I'm not sure that that solar idea has necessarily been reflected. It's just there's a big pointy

• 53:56Speaker 04

  stone that you can use in that sort of way. So for the Romans, clearly, there is that idea of imperial domination and exoticism as well. And of course, of course, it fits in with the Augustan, you know, agenda, you know, finding a stone, a city in brick and leaving it in stone, that sort of thing. And part of the stone is Egyptian stone from the empire.

• 54:22Tristan Hughes?

  And when do we see that be revived again? Is it with the imperial powers of the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th centuries? Is that when you start to see people taking a really big interest in obelisks again, you know, these visual ancient things with this mysterious hieroglyphic writing on them too? Is that when you start seeing them being transported now with steam power and everything across the seas to places which will include the United States, Britain and France?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  People were always interested in the obelisks that were in Rome. And when they were trying to decode hieroglyphs, they would they would try and use those. But they would also, unfortunately, use fake Egyptian artefacts in Rome. And it didn't really work out. So they were getting nowhere. But it's really after Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. And Egypt starts to open up to Westerners and people become more aware of these. That they they now start to be seen as desirable in the West. And they are either taken or given to people in the West. So you get someone like Belzoni, who retrieves the the obelisk that is now in Kingston Lacy. You get some of them given by gifts.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  But it's a difficult gift because if somebody gives you an obelisk, you've got to move it. You can't always move it, you know, it it's it's a difficult one. But it's about that time that they start to to spread out.

• 55:44Tristan Hughes?

  On that Kingston Lacy one, I remember doing something on that not so long ago, which is in a dorset, a country house. William John Banks, who is involved in the the deciphering of hieroglyphs and does that that part of his grand tour to Egypt down the river Nile, doesn't he? But I believe getting that obelisk from the Temple of Pheli to England. That last step of it going to the country house of Kingston Lacy. I believe he uses the Duke of Wellington's gun carriage.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  Well, I think my favourite transportation story is Cleopatra's Needle. The one that's standing in London, where where they have to create a a special ship to transport the the thing, which itself is towed. And it gets lost, you know, there's a storm, it gets detached and it gets lost and then is later found floating around.

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, people died, didn't they?

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Transporting Cleopatra's Needle. And Belzoni, again, is is a little point, but he he retrieves the Kingston Lacy obelisk. And he has to leave it till the water level is high enough in the Nile for him to move it. So it's it's it's it's very interesting that we can learn from how people have transported these things in modern times. It gives us a much a really good insight into the problems that the Egyptians faced. Interestingly, the two Cleopatra's Needles, the one in New York and the one in London, the people who transported them or were responsible for transporting them. Both wrote books about their experience because they thought that it was such a major thing and such a difficult thing to do that they actually preserved it for us to read.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  But I think we've got another phase as well that we need to mention, which is the Roman obelisks. Because by the time the Middle Ages by the Renaissance, quite a lot of those had fallen down and had been rediscovered during sort of early archaeological explorations in in Rome. And there's quite a phase there, particularly in the 16th century, of papal involvement of these things being rediscovered and re-erected in key places. What were now key places within Renaissance Rome. So that's why you see them appearing in these, you know, in major Renaissance Baroque squares,

• 57:56Speaker 04

  because they're being re-erected in different places to where they were when they came over as part of that Roman appropriation thing.

• 58:05Tristan Hughes?

  There you go. There you go. The papal impact as well.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Well, it's really interesting because sometimes people suggest that they should be sent back. And they've got such a history of transportation that you, where would they go back to? It's a really interesting dilemma. They have a life beyond their original life. Just being erected in front of the temple, you'd think that would be it and they would stand there. And presumably the pharaohs who erected them would think they were there forever. But no, they have their own afterlife and they go on to have their own histories, all of which seem to be fascinating.

• 58:36Tristan Hughes?

  They absolutely are. And I'm very, very grateful to you both for doing this interview with me today. I've always wanted to do obelisks and you both have highlighted the extraordinary wealth of information that there is to them and also the amount of mystery that there is. For instance, with various parts of their building process. Joyce, you've been on the podcast several times before and it's always been a pleasure. Stephen, it's been a pleasure to have you on for the first time, hopefully not the last. As said, husband and wife, brilliant Egyptology couple. And it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. It's been fascinating.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been a pleasure.

• 59:15Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was husband and wife Egyptology couple Dr Stephen Snape and Professor Joyce Tilslie talking through the story of obelisks in ancient Egypt and their legacy down to the present day. I hope you enjoy today's episode. Joyce, she has been a regular on the podcast. She's been the star of several past episodes varying from Nefertiti to the Great Pyramid of Giza to also featuring in our recent Egyptian Gods and Goddesses mini-series last year. So if you would like more episodes with Joyce Tilslie, you can find them in our Ancients archive. Thank you once again for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you want more ancient history

• 1:00:00Tristan Hughes?

  videos and clips in the meantime, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at @AncientsTristan. Don't forget, you can also listen to us, The Ancients, and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.