The oldest nation on the globe sends her greeting to her youngest sister. The "Setting Sun" has shed its last rays on the Old World from Egypt's sunny land and now appears on this western shore as a brilliant "Rising Sun". In the metropolis of the Western Hemisphere one of Egypt's grandest treasures meets our eyes and, though silent, reminds us of her former greatness. Here stands a monument of two of her greatest Pharaohs, lords and conquerors, scourges of their people, and a terror to their foes. It tells the story of serfs and teems with cringing words and the praise of despots. Yet it was a glorious time when this monument was erected and inscribed, a time of power, pride, learning, greatness, conquest for the lords, but for the people a time of abject subjection, misery, and hardships. Pharaoh was master of all. But the sun of his grandeur has set and vanished, and our obelisk, that proud monument of Pharaonic times, now sees a spectacle which the greatest flight of fancy could not have pictured to any man of those by-gone days.
Here in the western land the obsequious adoration of one man is no more. Here the people are not under the lash and miserable; they are, with all their cares and labors, a happy and contented people. The realm is not, as in those former days, the result of a despot's triumphant march, but a grand, harmonious union of friends.
On such a picture our obelisk looks down from its lofty pedestal. Had it a tongue, it could tell us many a tale of the past, when Thothmes III. erected it with pomp and festivities, when Ramses II. engraved his name upon it, and the law-giver Moses, the Israelite, played and studied in its view, how it escaped the fury of the demoniac ravager Cambyses, was transported by the Romans to Alexandria, escaped Mohammedan fanaticism, and was at last conveyed as a precious prize from its sunny home to our fitful climate. It seems oddly out of place here, and its coat of paraffine will not protect it wholly from bleak winds and rain, and winter's ice and snow. It has lived its longest time on earth, and at the advanced age of thirty-four centuries it must decline, until it will totter and fall. Then having so long symbolized the "Rising Sun" in all its beauty, and having greeted its glorious advent with every dawn and break of day, the "Setting Sun" will shroud it for the last time in its light, but the new sun of morning will seek its old friend in vain. It will fade away, but its memory will last much longer than inscriptions on stone which must perish sooner or later. Let us, however, the children of a new era, learn from it the greatness of its authors!
CHAPTER I
Obelisks—where found, and when, and by whom erected.
§1. Obelisks have been found in various localities of the ancient Egyptian empire. Possibly almost every city of some prominence will have boasted of some, no matter how small, especially such cities as became for a time the residence of the Pharaoh. They would also be placed in cities in which grand temples had been erected for the worship of some prominent deity, and if we can rely upon the reports of travelers, they are even found in the adjacent Sinaitic Peninsula to serve as monuments to the praise of some king's achievements. Unfortunately, however, for any deductions, most of the obelisks which were certainly erected in various places are completely gone either through the violence of foes, the ravages of a Cambyses, or else the internal dissensions of the people and the subsequent ruin, and the ruthless sand of the desert. Of the obelisks, which formerly must have been counted by hundreds, we can scarcely find fifty, and of these only a few are perfect or of purely Egyptian origin.
As far as can be ascertained from the obelisks of the present day, most of them point as the original place of their erection to that city preëminently called the "City of Obelisks" in Lower Egypt, the Heliopolis of the ancients, at present مطريه Matarīyeh, near Cairo. They were here placed around and in front of the temple of the sun, which was the principal sanctuary of the city. From this fact Heliopolis received the name "house of the sun", or בֵּת שֶׁמֶשׁ [bêth shêmesh], as mentioned in the Bible. These obelisks formed the leading attraction at that remote time and undoubtedly remained such until the city's utter destruction. Their fame spread far and wide, for in Jeremiah xliii:13 we find the prophet mentioning the "upright stones" [מַצְבוֹת mazzebhôth] of Heliopolis, which were doomed to perish. Heliopolis, in the days of its power, must have presented a glorious picture to the observer, no less when Joseph wedded a daughter of the high-priest, as when, some centuries later, the law-giver Moses was a student at Egypt's foremost university in this city.
Another city, however, claims our attention as on an almost equal footing with Heliopolis as regards obelisks. Thebes in Upper Egypt, the famous city of one hundred gates, as Homer calls it, the largest city of the ancient world, had besides its many grand temples and palaces a number of the largest obelisks extant. Four of them still tower above the piles of ruins scattered on all sides, while a still larger number must lie buried deep in the ground. It was quite appropriate that here in the metropolis of Upper Egypt, where Pharaoh passed much of his time and where he was crowned with all the pomp and magnificence of a victor, a number of obelisks should proclaim his praise. They were made for the living to gaze upon, and were therefore erected on the eastern bank of the Nile where the city proper stood, while the western bank was wholly surrendered to the dead. The modern villages of Karnak (قرناق) and Luxor (اقصر) now mark the spot where Thebes was situated. However, if we are to believe a traveler, Villiers Stuart, who found two prostrate obelisks of an old dynasty in the necropolis or cemetery on the western bank of the Nile, and take into account that Lepsius found his obelisk at Gizeh, the necropolis of Memphis, also on the western bank of the Nile, we must infer that the oldest obelisks were not always set up with a view to being admired by the living, but simply served as head-stones for the dead.
