Philae obelisk

Description

This obelisk was once part of a pair located at the east pylon of Philae’s temple of Isis. Its companion was shattered long ago. The remaining monument has a long shaft, a pyramidion on top, and a rectangular base; the lower part of the shaft is a modern addition. With its modern base, the obelisk reaches about seven meters in height.

It carries two inscriptions: a hieroglyphic text on the shaft and a Greek text on the base. The Greek inscription’s first half, painted in red, has faded completely; the second half was carved into the stone. Both texts appear in the Corpus of Ptolemaic Inscriptions as number 424. The hieroglyphs date from 131 to 124 BC, while the Greek text is slightly later, from 124 to 117 BC.

The base’s Greek inscription records a complaint from Philae’s Egyptian priests and a reply from Ptolemy VIII Euergetes and queens Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III, who ruled together from 144 to 132 BC and again from 126 to 116 BC. The priests objected to the high cost of hosting the many royal officials who visited their sanctuary. The king and queens granted their request and ordered the governor to end the temple’s obligation to serve state functionaries.

Acquisition

In 1815, while traveling through Egypt, Bankes spotted the obelisk and thought its two-language inscription could help crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs. He bought the obelisk along with a large broken chunk of its matching twin from Philae, and the adventurer Giovanni Belzoni handled moving them to Bankes’s property at Kingston Lacy in Dorset, England. The obelisk reached London in December 1821, making it the first Egyptian obelisk ever brought to the UK. A gun carriage from Arthur Wellesley moved it to Kingston Lacy in 1829, and George IV supplied Libyan granite to fix the shaft’s base. In 1830, the obelisk became the garden’s centerpiece, raised into place by nineteen horses. The broken twin piece was placed nearby on the lawn as a picturesque ruin. The obelisk, along with the house and estate, went to the National Trust in 1981 and is now a Grade II listed building.

Decipherment of hieroglyphs

C. W. Ceram characterised the obelisk as 'in effect a second Rosetta Stone.' George Scharf produced several lithographs of the obelisk and its inscriptions while it was in London; Bankes distributed these to contemporaries interested in deciphering hieroglyphs. Thomas Young, studying the Rosetta Stone, had already realised cartouches contained pharaohs' names and identified 'Ptolemy'. In a marginal note on some lithographs, Bankes proposed identifying the name 'Cleopatra' in cartouches on this inscription.

Further progress was stymied because the Greek and Egyptian texts were not close parallels and because Bankes and Young incorrectly believed hieroglyphs were logographic. In France, Jean-François Champollion, working on decipherment, had constructed a hypothetical hieroglyphic text for 'Cleopatra' based on earlier demotic work. Jean-Antoine Letronne sent him a copy of the lithograph, which confirmed his reconstruction; Champollion announced the decipherment in the Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822.

Bankes, Young, and their circle responded with great hostility, claiming Champollion had not given them proper credit. The obelisk was later investigated by Karl Richard Lepsius, who published its text in 1839. Ulrich Wilcken carried out further autopsy in 1887 and reported the painted Greek inscription was no longer visible. Subsequent publications have all been based on these nineteenth-century observers' reports.

Digital research

By 2014, the inscriptions were heavily weathered; the Greek inscription was barely visible to the naked eye. In October and November 2014 and spring 2015, Ben Altshuler of the Institute for Digital Archaeology, with Alan Bowman and Charles Crowther of Oxford's Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents and a commercial measurement company called GOM UK, undertook RTI scans and 3D imaging of the obelisk. The scans showed Scharf's lithograph accurately represented the hieroglyphic text and enabled some small corrections to the recorded Greek text. Possible traces of the painted Greek text were also detected. The obelisk, reflecting its bilingual nature and the translation metaphor of the Rosetta space mission, gives its name to the Philae robotic lander, which arrived at comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014 and landed on 12 November 2014.