Obelisk: A History (review)

Like the pyramids, Egyptian obelisks have fascinated Western culture as archetypical built forms for millennia. Unlike the pyramids, these impressive monoliths have served cultures that followed the Egyptian as souvenirs of conquest and symbols of power. An important aspect of their political importance was the technological act of moving them, an issue that Bern Dibner treated so well in his 1950 monograph Moving the Obelisks. The authors of this book undertook to supplement Dibner’s work with an examination of obelisks’ role as cultural symbols and the shifting meaning that society invested in these objects. This meaning runs the full gamut of human concern from religion and philosophy in ancient Egypt to pomp and power in Rome and the Papal States to antiquarianism and then esoteric concerns on the borderline between faith and science to pomp, pretention, and sexuality in the modern period.

Each of these concerns has its chronologically organized chapter in the historical development. Although there is no thesis that unites the concerns, there are twelve chapters that document twelve stages in this evolution, and each of them is treated in great detail inextricably mingled with the development of modern thought, personal ambition, and national politics. The authors’ goal was to explain why moving obelisks was an important political and societal issue in Western culture. There is therefore little technology in this account but a great deal of social context, much of it never explained before.

Where the authors do venture into technology or the scientific basis of technology they do miss some questions of interest. We miss any speculation, for instance, on a reason for the “sudden” shift from earth to stone construction around 2700 bce in Egypt (p. 13). We do gain new knowledge from archaeological reports of the method of carving the monoliths from the rock (pp. 25–29), but without sufficient detail to understand it fully. In comparing the transportation of the Paris obelisk in the early nineteenth century (essentially the same techniques developed by Domenico Fontana for Rome in the sixteenth century) to the steam-powered methods subsequently used by the English and then the Americans half a century later (pp. 254–55), the heroic use of muscle power is considered symbolically superior to the use of mechanical means. In fact, the authors regard the modern, mechanized movement of the obelisks as a “retreat into practicality” in comparison with the socially important symbolic aspect (p. 269). This contrasts with what Michele Mercati wrote in the sixteenth century about Fontana’s technical innovation of using capstans in improvement of what he thought was the method the Romans had used in antiquity (p. 134), and it negates the intellectual and especially the cultural value of both industrialization and the consequent development of technology in the nineteenth century.

That said, the descriptions of the political competition between Fontana and others for the contract to move the Vatican obelisk (pp. 109–16), or Athanasius Kircher’s esoteric speculations that influenced the siting and reerection of the Piazza Navona obelisk (chapter 7), as well as the political symbolism of Bernini’s small elephant-borne obelisk behind the Pantheon (pp. 172–73) provide insight into the intellectual mindset and the political realities that support or resist the development of technological solutions—and that is indeed both interesting and very useful.

Supplementing the information in Dibner’s book, the study reveals that there were many more obelisks moved under varying degrees of difficulty than the iconic ones—Saint Peter’s at the Vatican, Paris, London, New York—with which we are familiar. A comparison of the various forms and stages of technological development in such work would be interesting as a demonstration of the role of technology in the expression of power. That book has yet to be written, but here we find an exhaustive catalog of the history and intellectual background of moving obelisks that provides us with a roadmap for future research. Herein lies the interest of this book for the historian...