Dispelling Some Myths: Cleopatra's Needles

Take a walk along the Victoria Embankment in the City of Westminster, London and near the Golden Jubilee Bridges you will find Cleopatra's Needle (pictured). Unfortunately, this nearly 21 metre tall, pyramid-tipped, ancient obelisk [1] has no connection with the Ptolemaic Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt.

There are in fact three obelisks, each nearly 3,500 years old, bearing the popular misnomer of “Cleopatra's Needle”. Besides the London one, a second was erected in the Place de la Concorde in Paris while the third stands in Central Park just west of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. All three “needles” are indeed genuine ancient Egyptian obelisks, but each was already over a thousand years old in the famous Queen's lifetime.

The London and New York examples are a pair of obelisks originally sculpted from granite quarried in southern Egypt around 1450 BC during the reign of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III. They were first erected in Heliopolis, near present-day Cairo, a major cult centre for the worship of the sun god, Ra. Various obelisks were similarly raised in Heliopolis to venerate Egypt’s chief deity. By contrast, the Paris “needle” dates to the reign of the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II and was once part of a pair originally marking the entrance to a temple site in Luxor; its twin remains there to this day. The obelisk now in Paris was the first of the three to be moved and re-erected during the 19th-century.

In 12 BC, more than 14 centuries after its creation, the London “needle” was relocated to Alexandria. This Hellenistic city on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast prospered during the last pharaonic dynasty, the Ptolemies, of which Cleopatra VII has become the most famous member. Interestingly, the New York needle was the first to acquire the French nickname, “L'aiguille de Cléopâtre” (“Cleopatra's Needle”), when it still stood in Alexandria.

Scroll forward to 1819 and the obelisk we now call “Cleopatra’s Needle” was gifted to the British government by Muhammad Ali, the de-facto ruler of Egypt, in recognition of Horatio Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and that of Sir Ralph Abercromby at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. Yet it took until 1877 before the gift was eventually transported from Egypt to London, and even then things did not go smoothly.

The challenge of moving such a large chunk of granite, perhaps weighing up to 200 tonnes, inspired Britons to raise £15,000 to fund the venture. The obelisk was sealed within an iron cylinder that was rolled into the sea. This unusual vessel, named Cleopatra, was towed out to sea by the steamship Olga from Alexandria on 21 September 1877. Having sailed out of the Mediterranean and round the Iberian Peninsula into the Bay of Biscay, the Olga was struck by a fierce storm during which six men drowned and the Cleopatra broke free and drifted away presumed lost. Four days later, however, the cylinder was spotted, recovered to Ferrol in Spain, only to eventually arrive in Gravesend, Kent on 21 January 1878. It took a further nine months before the obelisk was finally erected in its current location on 12 September.

In 1881, two bronze sphinxes, cast in nearby Pimlico, were added on either flank of the obelisk and a bronze plague was affixed to the base to commemorate the six men who lost their lives transporting it to Britain. Today the obelisk stands proudly on the Thames Embankment bearing shrapnel scars on the base and the western sphinx from a German air raid in September 1917. So, what connection does this monument have with the famous Egyptian queen? Absolutely nothing, just a nickname linked to its journey to London. Bon appétit!

Endnote:

1. Originally called tekhenu by their ancient Egyptian builders, an obelisk is a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape or pyramidion at the top. Ancient obelisks are monolithic, i.e. they consist of a single stone. The ancient Greeks used their word obeliskos (ὀβελίσκος) to describe them (from obelos (ὀβελός) meaning 'spit, nail, pointed pillar').