Central Park Obelisk surrounded by tree branches in winter with a vintage old fashioned retro sepia style, New York, NY, March 2014. This photo was taken right before a scheduled conservation project.
The Obelisk in Central Park is an Egyptian antiquity, built 3,500 years ago in honor of Pharaoh Thutmose III, making it the oldest outdoor monument in New York City. Like most ancient obelisks, it is monolithic, that is, stonecutters in Heliopolis, Egypt carved it from a single block of quarried granite. They were originally called tekhenu by the Ancient Egyptians. The Greeks called them obeliskos.
The Obelisk in Central Park is an Egyptian antiquity, built 3,500 years ago in honor of Pharaoh Thutmose III, making it the oldest outdoor monument in New York City. Stonecutters in Heliopolis, Egypt carved it from a single block of quarried granite.
It was one of two obelisks erected outside of a temple and inscribed with hieroglyphs praising Pharaoh Thutmose III, who reigned from 1479 to 1425 BCE. The obelisks were toppled when the Persians invaded in 525 BCE and remained buried in sand for half a century until Caesar Augustus found them and brought them to Alexandria. Cleopatra installed them in a temple to honor Julius Caesar, which may explain why some call the Obelisk Cleopatras Needle, though it was carved more than a millennium before her reign.
In the late 19th century, the Egyptian government offered gave the Obelisk to the United States to further diplomatic relations. A special boat was built to transport it here from Alexandria, and then, when it arrived in Staten Island, it took another six months to get it to Central Park in Manhattan; a special railroad was built just for the task. It was erected in Central Park in New York on January 22, 1881.
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