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OBELISKS STILL IN EXILE:

MONUMENTS MADE TO MEASURE?
Grant Parker
Introduction
The first volume of Erik Iversens magisterial Obelisks in Exile (19681972) provides not only the basis for my own title but in fact the
necessary starting point for any consideration of Romes obelisks.1
This work encapsulates earlier scholarship that goes back to Michele
Mercatis Gli Obelischi di Roma (1589),2 offering detailed individual
accounts of the thirteen major pieces imported to the city of Rome
between the time of Augustus and Constantius II. As Iversens discussion shows, documentary sources on obelisks are much richer for
the early modern period than for the Roman empire. The appearance in recent years of several scholarly works points to renewed
interest in the topic.3 But if we were to ask the question, What did
obelisks mean to Romans?, the ancient period provides little direct
evidence compared to the early modern. The handful of inscriptions
and the descriptions by the elder Pliny (Natural History 36.70-36.74)
and Ammianus Marcellinus (Res gestae 17.4) seem, in this light, like
lean pickings.
Direct should, however, be the operative word here: indirectly,
there is much more that can be gleaned, especially if we take into
the account the wealth of recent scholarship on the eastern religions
of the Roman empire.4 Now, we can turn to several broader-based
approaches to the issue of the exotic, many of them drawing on
theoretical and comparative approaches. Cultural studies and postco-

Iversen, Obelisks (1968 & 1972).

Also available in a reprint edition, G. Cantelli (ed.) (Bologna 1981). A valuable
modern work is L. Habachi, Die unsterblichen Obelisken gyptens, in: C. Vogel (ed.) (Mainz
2000); see also Roullet, Rome.
3 B.C. Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: the afterlife of ancient Egypt in early modern Italy
(Chicago forthcoming 2006); a collected volume is under contract with MIT Press.
4 I think here particularly of titles in Brills series, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World
and its predecessor, tudes Prliminaires aux Religions Orientales dans lEmpire Romain.
2

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lonial studies have made their mark, in no case more so than Edward
Saids Orientalism.5 Further, the evidence is enriched by comparanda
from parts of the ancient world beyond Egypt. The net effect of
such innovations has been to move away from the overwhelmingly
antiquarian approaches of earlier work. Increasingly, scholars have
sought to emphasise that objects (actually or seemingly) from Egypt
should be understood in contextand it is certainly necessary to
take that term in a broad range of cultural, religious, political and
economic senses. Indeed, if context is deemed all-important, we
should not hesitate to ask, in light of contemporary cultural studies,
just what context is, how we can delimit it for practical purposes,
and what the implications are of those delimitations.6
If Aegyptiaca are now subject to new and newly self-aware scholarship, what does this hold for obelisks? Certainly recent books contain
discussions of them, yet there remains more to be done. In this
paper I would like to outline a new framework within which to try
to make historical sense of obelisks. Let us restate as the overarching
question: What did obelisks mean to Romans of the Empire? This
broad question clearly invites several possible answers, urging us to
consider such varied aspects as their transportation; the measuring of
obelisks and the use of them to provide measurements; the habit of
adding inscriptions to them; problems involved in describing them;
and finally imitations and representations. In all these respects one
may examine Roman responses to and interactions with obelisks.
By contrast, Egyptian ideas and practices are obviously relevant in
a broader sense, without being central. By the same token, we must
be aware that material from later periodsfrom the medieval to our
ownmay offer further lines of inquiry. A fuller account of visual
responses to obelisks might thus examine not only ancient frescoes
and mosaics but also modern architectural appropriations of the
obelisk form. In other words, if we consider any one surviving obelisk
its longevity invites us to look forward and backward in time. It is
insufficient to recognize that obelisks have been objects of collection
5 P. Vasunia, Hellenism and empire: reading Edward Said, Parallax 9 (2003) 8897; cf. D.J. Mattingly (ed.), Dialogues in Roman Imperialism: power, discourse and discrepant
experience in the Roman Empire (Newport, Rhodes Island 1995).
6 E.A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: historians and the linguistic turn (Cambridge, Mass.
2004), following the cultural theorist Dominic LaCapra. Note the insistence on context in M.J. Versluys and P.G.P. Meyboom, Les scnes dites nilotiques et les cultes
isiaques. Une interprtation contextuelle, in: De Memphis Rome 111-128.

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par excellence: it is necessary to examine the issues of power with which

they became entangled. In what follows I shall outline each of those
five aspects before focusing on one in particular.

1. Transporting
Appropriation has a physical aspect, and it behooves us to begin
in this most concrete sense. Both Pliny and Ammianus emphasise
the physical act of movement, suggesting that this was an important
aspect of their social meaning in Rome; the Latin inscriptions added
to their bases in many cases emphasise their transportation. The act
of moving is illustrated on the base of the Hippodrome obelisk in
Istanbul, in which the process of moving the object is effectively made
part of the product itself. From this point of view the relief invites
comparison with the paintings of Queen Hatshepsut at Karnak, in
which she celebrates her act of moving obelisks downstream to her
temple complex.7 Early modern instances include Domenico Fontanas and Athanasius Kirchers illustrations in the late sixteenth and
mid-seventeenth centuries, on the Nile and in the Mediterranean (in
the case of Kircher) and within the city of Rome (Fontana).8
These physical acts of moving are, in another sense, metaphors for
their changes in audience, and hence changes of meaning. Physical
and metaphorical displacement are in this sense related, particularly
if when we recognise that the transportation of obelisks become
part of their social meaning. This much is clear from the inscribed
bases upon which obelisks were erected, as we shall see below. It is
necessary to ask how (or whether) the transportation of an obelisk
specifically is an index of monarchic power, and particularly riverine
despotism. The skill of Augustus, for one, in manipulating political
power makes it important to scrutinise the earliest Roman obelisks
from such a perspective.

7 R.F. Heizer, Ancient heavy transport, methods and achievements, Science

153.3738 (1966) 821-830 at 825.
8 D. Fontana, Della trasportatione dellObelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di nostro signore papa
Sisto V (Rome 1590); A. Kircher, Obeliscus Pamphilius (Rome 1650). Exemplary among
recent scholarship on Kircher is P. Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher: the last man who knew
everything (New York 2004).

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2. Measuring

The authority to measure time can be an index of state power, in

the Roman world and beyond. One eminent case here is the obelisk placed at Augustus behest in the Campus Martius, which by
its shadow denoted the emperors birthday (hence denoting cyclical
time). But it also connoted Egypts deep antiquity (linear time) and
Romes conquest over that land. In both respects Augustus use of
obelisks deserves examination in light of his concern with calendrical
reform, for which there is of course also substantial epigraphic and
literary evidence.9 To the matter of measuring we shall return in
the second half of this article.

3. Inscribing
Most of Romes obelisks arrived in the city already inscribed in Middle
Egyptian on their flanks: once there, a Latin inscription would be
added to the base.10 For example, the Lateran obelisk has both,
the Latin inscription of Constantius II being all of twenty-four lines
long (CIL VI 1163).11 The Vatican obelisk is a major exception
in that it has no hieroglyphic texts: from its brief Latin text, the
name of the disgraced prefect Cornelius Gallus has been erased,
and thus it offers an instance of damnatio memoriae.12 The obelisk
at Piazza Navona, coming from the Iseum Campense and inscribed
at Domitians behest in Middle Egyptian, is another unusual case,
which seems to have been intended to make an impression rather
than be read in any usual sense. This may be regarded as a mystifying or even magical use of writing, where the purpose is clearly
not to impart information. Like a number of other obelisks, such
as Hadrians on the Pincio in honour of Antinous, it shows the fact
that Roman emperors sometimes used the Middle Egyptian language
9 A. Wallace-Hadrill, Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus and the Fasti, in: M.
Whitby et al. (eds.), Homo Viator: Classical essays for John Bramble (Bristol 1987) 221-230.
10 In an unusual and telling instance, the Hippodrome obelisk reflects the different
language politics of Constantinople, its base being inscribed in both Greek and Latin:
Iversen, Obelisks (1972) 12-13.
11 Cf. Iversen, Obelisks (1968) 57-58
12 Iversen, Obelisks (1968) 19-46; cf. C.W. Hedrick Jr., History and Silence: purge and
rehabilitation of memory in late antiquity (Austin, Tex. 2000) esp. 89-131.

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and hieroglyphic script to have their own names inscribed.13

There are grounds to consider these inscriptions as performances
of power, that is, the very display of writing as a means of exercising
power: it will be necessary to inquire how this functions.14 In what
ways does the writing on an obelisk transform the object for the
viewer? Do inscriptions attempt to fix the meaning of their obelisks
for all time? What powers of writing can we see here, when the text
itself is so exotic? There seems at least a prima facie case that obelisks
present a highly unusual use of writing, from the point of view of
their Roman audiences. Questions about the pragmatics of writing
are subject to considerable scholarly interest. If the relation of writing and power is a key topic here, then classical Athens provides
fascinating material for potential comparison.15 But the search for
comparanda can lead us even further afield: studies of cross-cultural
encounter in the early modern Americas offer much here, not least
the concept of the colonisation of language.16 What the Roman
obelisks and this material have in common is an abstracted, decontextualised (and recontextualised) use of a language from a contact
zone of colonialism.

4. Describing
The relation of word and object will be examined under two closely
related rubrics: description and narration. When the elder Pliny and
Ammianus Marcellinus discuss obelisks their descriptions contain
narrative elements. It is necessary to read Plinys and Ammianus
comments in light of those authors concerns, to consider their physical
being in relation to the mechanics of their transportation as well as
to the political dealings with which they were caught up. Into what
kinds of Roman discourse were obelisks incorporated? Ammianus,

13

Iversen, Obelisks (1968) 161-162; E. M. Ciampini, Gli Obelischi iscritti di Roma

(Rome 2004) 168-187; in detail H. Meyer (ed.), Der Obelisk des Antinoos. Eine kommentierte
Edition (Munich 1994).
14 G. Woolf, Monumental writing and the expansion of Roman society in the
Early Empire, JRS 86 (1996) 22-39.
15 D.T. Steiner, The Tyrants Writ (Princeton 1994); see now also A. Bresson et al.
(eds.), Lcriture publique du pouvoir (Paris 2005).
16 W. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality and colonization
(Ann Arbor 1995).

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writing about one particular obelisk, implies that its history was a
matter of defeating human intentions, particularly those of arrogant monarchs. An eminent case is presented by Constantines two
obelisks (now at the church of St John Lateran in Rome and at the
Hippodrome in Istanbul): these he had moved to Alexandria, with
the intention of transporting them across the Mediterranean, but
it was only after his death that Constantius II had one moved to
Rome and Theodosius the other to Constantinople.
Such narrations also raise the topic of origins: do they suggest
that the intentions of those raising obelisks determined the meaning of the object for all time? It appears rather that both Pliny and
Ammianus, concentrating as they do on the Roman afterlives of the
obelisks, themselves see the objects as belated, and thus show hints
of challenging the foundational approach to their meaning. Clearly,
intentions are central to the concept of a monument, namely to
commemorate, and it is necessary to investigate these; but, equally,
these intentions themselves are of limited significance if we consider
the lives of these objects more broadly. Indeed, the longer an object
survives, the more likely it is to be appropriated by others. It is in such
descriptions that we find clues as to how the obelisks have become
objects of collection. The fact that they are individual objects and
few in number, even in the case of Augustus, merely increases their
social value as objects of collection.17

5. Imitating
The Nilotic landscapes found on ancient frescoes and mosaics offer
ancient representations of obelisks, and may be considered in a broader frame that includes replications of their form in modern times.18
The early modern period offers several examples, all the more interesting for the fact that they frequently conflate the terminology and
forms of pyramid and obelisk. In Rome of the 1930s Mussolini not
only had a massive obelisk made for display in his Foro Italico, but
imported the most easily available approximation of an ancient
Egyptian obelisk, namely the stele from Axum. Its return in April
17 G. Parker, Narrating monumentality: the Piazza Navona obelisk, Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 16 (2002) 193-215 raises questions of narrative.
18 Meyboom, Nile Mosaic, and Versluys, Aegyptiaca Romana.

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2005 came amidst heated debates over cultural propertydebates

that take place against a background of postcolonial world politics
and of the international art market.19 Beyond Italy, the shipping of
obelisks to Paris, London and New York in the nineteenth century
should be seen alongside imitations of their form in the same century
and after, for example in Sydney, Buenos Aires and Washington DC.
As in the case of Theodosius Constantinople, it appears obelisks
are a useful way of making a new city into a metropolis, conferring
grandeur and history on the city even as it adds a measure of legitimacy to the power structures associated with it.
An aura of modernity is part of such enterprises, as we have
already glimpsed above. In the case of Moscows Memorial Museum
of Cosmonautics, built in 1964 to commemorate the launch of the
Sputnik, the use of titanium and a 100-metre soaring shape reveal
innovation brought to an ancient form. Its title, To the Conquerors
of Space, underlines its obvious triumphalism. Such an adaptation
suggests that a moment of high modernity can be articulated in
relation to antiquity. Again, this poses questions concerning Roman
uses. From this point of view, the remaking of Rome is not merely
a matter of Roman topography in the narrow sense, but points to
the metropolitan status or aspirations of other cities as well. In this
case, an obelisk helps complete the triad of the Three Romes, each
aiming in their time to some kind of universal power.
The obelisk has done less well in postmodern art. Yet there are
a number of instances that clearly seek to challenge the phallocentric self-promotion so obviously linked with obelisks. An eminently
postmodern appropriation of the obelisk form is found in Barnett
Newmans three identical steel sculptures designed in 1963-1967,
entitled Broken obelisk, one of which has a commanding position in
New Yorks revamped Museum of Modern Art. The version at Houston, Texas was dedicated in 1968 to Martin Luther King, who was
assassinated in that year; a third resides on the Seattle campus of the
University of Washington. This abstract expressionist work is clearly
a reaction to the conventional aggrandising use of obelisks, and a
subversive comment on that ancient convention.20
19 R. Pankhurst, Ethiopia, the Axum obelisk, and the return of Africas cultural
heritage, African Affairs 98.391 (1999) 229-239; K. von Henneberg, Monuments,
public space, and the memory of empire in modern Italy, History and Memory 16.1
(2004) 37-85.
20 S. Polcari, Barnett Newmans Broken Obelisk, Art Journal 53.4 (1994) 48-55.

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Again: Measuring obelisks

If we want to consider the matter of measuring in greater detail, we

should first rehearse some basic details of the obelisks now at the
Piazza di Montecitorio and the Piazza del Popolo. The Montecitorio obelisk is 21.79 metres tall, weighing some 214 metric tons,
and originates in Egypts Late Kingdom, the 26th dynasty. As the
fragmentary inscriptions on its flanks indicate, it was quarried on the
instruction of Psammetichus II (594-589 BCE). Installed at Heliopolis,
it commemorated the first anniversary of his inauguration.21
Augustus had it brought to Rome in 10 BCE to be the gnomon
of his giant sundial on the Campus Martius. Located adjoining the
Ara Pacis Augustae and loosely linked with Augustus Mausoleum,
this sundial covered an extensive area of 160 x 75 metres. At its top
was a bronze ball whose function was to augment the suns shadow.
According to the elder Pliny (HN 36.72-36.73), it was designed by
the mathematician Novius Facundus in such a way that the length
of the shadow at noon corresponded to the width of the pavement.
This had been out of alignment for some thirty years, however, he
adds. Further evidence has come to light with excavations undertaken
between 1979 and 1981, though there is dispute over its interpretation. A constellation of bronze markers indicated signs of the zodiac
and other astrological features. These large inscriptions suggest an
attempt, under the emperor Domitian, to restore accuracy to the
Augustan monument, redeploying the Augustan letters.22
This obelisk is usually presented as one of a pair together with
that now at the Piazza del Popolo, which Augustus had placed in
the same year in the spina of the Circus Maximus. This obelisk too
was brought from Heliopolis, and was given the same inscription
on its base. However, if we consider their origins this proves to be
an older piece, erected by Sety I and further inscribed by his son
Rameses II, both of the 19th Dynasty (13th century BCE). Though
both obelisks are considerably damaged, Pliny appears to have mistaken their relative heights (HN 36.71), for almost certainly the Circus

21

For the Middle Egyptian inscription, see Ciampini, Gli Obelischi 142-149.
On the obelisk now at Montecitorio, see further Iversen, Obelisks (1968) 142160. On the Horologium, see E. Buchner, Die Sonnenuhr des Augustus (Mainz 1982), with
detailed criticism by M. Schtz, Gymnasium 97 (1990) 432-457; also S. Berti, Orologi
publici nel mondo antico (1991) 83-87.
22

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obelisk was taller. This was destined to be one of the four obelisks
re-erected by Pope Sixtus V, who had it placed in the Piazza del
Popolo in 1587.
We can infer from the Einsiedeln itinerary that it was still standing
in the eighth century. But around the time of the Norman invasion
of 1084 it collapsed or was destroyed. On its early modern history
we are much better informed. Antiquarians and scholars came upon
its base in 1475 and the obelisk itself in 1502. The usual suspects
took an interest: Sixtus V had some excavations done in 1587 and
likewise the learned Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in 1654-1666. Yet it
was not until 1748 that it was fully excavated, and erected in 1792
in its present location at the behest of pope Pius VI. Substantial
parts of the shaft were replaced with blocks of granite taken from
the column of Antoninus Pius. Most of the inscriptions have in fact
been lost, so fragmentary is the lower section of its shaft. It underwent substantial renovations in the 1960s, when the 18th-century
brickwork threatened to collapse as a result of corroded pins and
water seepage.23
What do these two obelisks have to do with measuring, in the
spatial and temporal senses of that term? In the city of Rome, they
created or emphasised lines of sight within public spaces. Obelisks
placed in the spina of a hippodrome or circus measured the centre
of that space by demarcating the horses track. The circling of the
horses suggested movement of the planets around the sun, and hence
suggested solar cult, according to the hostile evidence of Tertullian
(Spect. 8).
The temporalities they marked out were complex. With the Campus Martius obelisk Augustus not only denoted his birthday (and thus
cyclical time) but also connoted Egypts deep antiquity (linear time),
and with it Romes conquest over Egypt. In particular, it evoked the
victory at Actium in 31 BCE, so central to Augustus self-presentation.24 It connoted further, one might add, Romes control over its
grain supplythe metropolis had long since outgrown the nutritive
capacity of Italy. In both temporal and spatial respects Augustus
use of obelisks deserves examination in light of his concern with

23 The life-history of the Piazza del Popolo obelisk is recounted in greater detail at
Iversen, Obelisks (1968) 65-75.
24 P. Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor 1990) 144; more
generally D. Favro, The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge 1996) 252-270.

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calendrical reform, of which there is significant collateral evidence.

It is ironic that, when Augustus and later emperors sought to present
Rome as the centre of cosmos and imperium, they reached back
to the earliest conceivable past. Obelisks could thus signify power
over time: the eternity of Roman power, of imperium sine fine (Virgil,
Aeneid 1.279), required the fusing of Egyptian antiquity and Roman
modernity and in the process created a timeless Mediterranean-wide
empire.25
The location of the Campus Martius obelisk in Augustus horologium
marked the centre-point of a major public space in way that any
contemporary visitor to Romeor for that matter Pariswill readily grasp. Their distinctive verticality helps them articulate lines of
sight, particularly when placed in the centre of a public square. Of
course the Montecitorio obelisk, pointing to heavenly constellations,
also articulated time in its capacity as a gnomon. This involved both
the cyclical time of the calendar year but also, we may infer, the
deep time of Egyptian antiquity. This idea of Egypt is in keeping
with Herodotus second book, and gives special place to monuments
(though Herodotus himself does not mention obelisks). Certainly a
sense of Egyptian antiquity is implicit when Pliny emphasises that
the Egyptians were inventors of the obelisk form.
There is a further sense of measuring, if we may extrapolate from
his initial comment about competition between kings (36.64 quodam
certamine). Measuring is thus linked to the one-upmanship of successive emperors. For Pliny, they were closely tied up with the rhetoric
of number, which was central to ancient and medieval articulations
of Romes grandeur.26 Plinys passage shows us that obelisks bear
comparison with regard to their size and the number of people
needed to erect them. This is part of a much larger phenomenon.
In the fourth century, the anonymous Curiosum Urbis Regionum quattuordecim mentions 6 obelisksnamely 2 in the Circus Maximus, 1
in the Vatican, 1 in the Campus Martius and 2 on the Mausoleum
of Augustus8 bridges, 7 hills, 11 fora and so on. Here they add to
a kind of admiration by internal comparison. Measuring is usually

25 On the cosmologic context of imperial ideology, P. Hardie, Virgils Aeneid:

Cosmos and imperium (Oxford 1986).
26 N. Purcell. The city of Rome, in: R. Jenkyns (ed.), The Legacy of Rome (Oxford
1992) 421-453 esp. 422-426; C. Edwards, Writing Rome: textual approaches to the city
(Cambridge 1996).

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considered geographically, but it is relevant also to monumentality:

here we have to recognize that sheer size is part of Roman monumental thinkingat least in its realisationthis being in addition
to its memorial function.
For such considerations there are at least two possible comparanda,
one each from the Old and New Worlds. The first is the obelisk that
has stood since 1833 at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. This site,
which as the Place de la Rvolution had witnessed the executions
of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and hundreds of others in 17931794, underwent radical transformations thereafter. The erection
there of an obelisk from the Luxor temple by King Louis-Philippe,
donated in 1829 by the Egyptian viceroy Mehmet Ali, emphasised
the change in the urban landscape. Carefully aligned with the citys
axe historique, it served to celebrate Napoleons Egyptian expedition,
which exerted such an influence on French scholarship and art.27
Of particular relevance here is the fact that the base supporting the
obelisk splendidly depicts the process by which it was brought from
Egypt to France.
The second comparandum is not even an ancient one: the small
monolith standing at Macquarie Place in central Sydney, Australia
(figs. 1 and 2). Yet, I would argue that modern obelisks articulate
interpretations of their ancestors and can in that sense pose questions
of them. It is a much smaller than the Paris obelisk, and it differs
also in being dwarfed by the surrounding buildings. Nonetheless,
since its erection in the early 19th century, the immediate purpose
of measuring distance in the new colonial spacein what was known
in Australia as terra nullius. With it, matters of land ownership and
occupancy could be settled legally. The inscription on its base reads:
This obelisk was erected in Macquarie Place in AD 1818 to record
that all public roads leading to the interior of the colony are measured
from it. L. Macquarie Esq., Governor. Lachlan Macquarie, governor-general of New South Wales from 1810 to 1822, was an ardent
reformer, roadbuilder and ktists of towns.28 Such an interpretation
raises particular points of comparison with Rome, and helps move
the study of obelisks beyond antiquarianism. The important point
to emerge here is that the practical purpose of measuring space
27

E.W. Said, Orientalism (London 1978) 80-88.

M. Clark, A Short History of Australia (4th revised edn., Camberwell, Victoria
1995) 36-53.
28

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Fig. 1. The small monolith standing at Macquarie Place in central Sydney,

Australia.

and marking place is combined with the symbolic evocations of the

states power. That power is itself mystified by allusion to Egypts
antiquity. British imperialism apparently invites comparison with
ancient Romes power over even-more-ancient Egypt: the obelisk
serves as a reassuring sign of the colonial order.

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Fig. 2. The small monolith standing at Macquarie Place in central Sydney, Australia,
inscription on the base.

Conclusion
I hope I have made a case for studying obelisks as signifiers: for posing
questions about their social meaning without imposing meaning in
the process. Indeed, I have in effect been arguing for a reception
studies approach, one that urges us to inhabit the space between
viewer/reader and creator/author rather than trying to overcome
it, and to see that space as an object of interpretation rather than
an obstacle to it. The post-antique lives of obelisks, no less than
the creation of modern or postmodern neo-obelisks, can raise
questions about ancient obelisks themselves, ones that the available
evidence cannot always answer conclusively but are nonetheless good
to consider. I hope also to have shown that obelisks in Roman eyes
were linked to measuring in several waysand I mean not only the
measuring of obelisks but also the use of obelisks in order to measure

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space and time. Both of these senses of measuring point us towards

the dynamics of power that are central to any understanding of their
place in Roman antiquity. And this is where Aegypto capta, the slogan
Octavian placed on some of his coins from 29 BCE, is significant
for obelisks: the notion that their exotic, ancient Egyptian land of
origin had been conquered was, I suspect, never far from the minds
of their Roman viewers.