@idespondent: In January 1881 a crowd gathered on a rise behind the new Metropolitan Museum to watch a 3,500-year-old shard of Egypt rise upright in Central Park for the first time in centuries. The obelisk began as a monument to the pharaoh Thutmose III at Heliopolis, and Cleopatra never touched it, but visitors have called it Cleopatra's Needle since Rome moved it to Alexandria. Egypt gave the sixty-nine-foot, 200-ton stone to the United States in the 1870s, and getting it across an ocean fell to naval officer Henry Gorringe. Gorringe's crew cut a hole in the bow of the steamer Dessoug, rolled the obelisk inside on iron cannonballs, sealed the hull back up, and sailed for New York with a propeller cracked mid-Atlantic. Once ashore, thirty-two horses in pairs dragged the stone from the Hudson River docks, and a steam engine shoved it up a wooden trestle into the park. Before the #obelisk went vertical, more than nine thousand Freemasons marched up Fifth Avenue past fifty thousand spectators to lay a cornerstone, honoring their claimed ties to ancient Egyptian builders. Under that cornerstone they sealed a time capsule stuffed with a Bible, Shakespeare, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and a sealed box nobody has ever recorded opening. A monument older than the #Hebrew kingdom of Israel now stands quietly in a Manhattan park, its hieroglyphs slowly eroding in weather it was never built for, its buried secret still under the grass. #CleopatrasNeedle #CentralPark #Egypt

idespondent

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Thursday 29 October 2026 16:04:04 GMT