Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader

by John Ludwig Hülshof

USEFUL INFORMATION

The great obelisk in Central Park, New York, is one of the most noted monoliths in the world. It was quarried, carved and erected about the time of Abraham, to commemorate the deeds of an ancient Pharaoh. Five hundred years later the conquering Sesostris, the bad Pharaoh of the Bible, carved on its surface the record of his famous reign.

Now Sesostris, or Rameses II, reigned one thousand years before the Trojan war, so that all the symbols now seen on the obelisk were already very old in the days of Priam, Hector and Ulysses. The Roman poet Horace says that there were many brave men before Agamemnon, but there was no Homer to put their valiant deeds in verse. Sesostris was an exception. He escaped oblivion without the aid of Homer, and the figures upon the hard granite of Cleopatra's Needle tell us even now, after more than thirty-five centuries, of the reign of that remarkable king.