Among the characteristic monumental forms employed by the Egyptians – pyramids, sphinxes, etc. – the obelisk seems to have enjoyed the richest and most distinctive “afterlife.” Over the two millennia of their original production, Egyptian obelisks varied in size from relatively small funerary stones to the slender, towering monoliths of red Aswan granite that were erected before and within the precincts of the greatest Egyptian temples. Obelisks were dedicated in most cases to the solar gods of Egypt, and their soaring height and tapering shape – capped by a pyramidal (and originally gilded) pinnacle called a pyramidion– seemed to reach from the earth into the heavens and touch the rays of the life-giving sun. For centuries to come, these great stones have challenged the imaginations of spectators: Greek and Roman, Christian and Muslim, Renaissance, and Modern – who were awed by their soaring height, titanic weight, and paradoxically slender and tapering shape. They were endowed with...
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to acknowledge the useful suggestions provided by his colleagues, including Pamela Long, Anthony Grafton, Benjamin Weiss, Jeffrey Collins, and Okasha El-Daly. All dates given for Pharaohs and their Ptolemaic and Roman successors follow the chronology in Shaw (2000/2003, pp. 480–489).
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Curran, B.A. (2014). Obelisks in Ancient Egypt. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8815-2
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