Rome's Obelisks: Ancient Spoils of War

It goes without saying that Rome is an old city with some buildings dating back over two thousand years. But the oldest objects to be seen in Rome’s streets are not, in fact, Roman at all; they belong to a much more ancient civilisation. In fact, several were already hundreds of years old when Romulus was a mere glint in his mother’s eye. I am, of course, referring to the obelisks, thirteen in total and all Egyptian in origin.
The city happens to be home to almost fifty percent of the total number of Egyptian obelisks in the entire world and the reason for this goes back to Rome’s first emperor, Augustus.

Obelisks first arrived in the city as the spoils of war. To Julius Caesar’s famous comment: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’ his adopted son might have added ‘and I took’. For it was Augustus who brought the first obelisks back to Rome after his conquest of Antony and Cleopatra in 31BC.

The first to arrive now stands in the Piazza del Popolo, but was originally erected in the Circus Maximus, where it decorated the spina, the narrow strip of land around which the chariots raced. The obelisk dates back to the 12th or 13th century BC and once stood in Heliopolis, where Augustus first saw it. He took a liking to it and as the country was now under his control, there was nothing to stop him from transporting it back to Rome, which he duly did. In the next four hundred years twelve more would follow.

Hewn from granite and often weighing in excess of hundreds of tons, the obelisks vary in height (from 18 to over 100 feet) and age (1,800 to 3,500 years old). In Egypt they symbolised the rays of the sun and were erected in pairs, flanking the entrances to temples. Of the thirteen obelisks in Rome, seven date back to the time of the Pharoahs, while the other six were carved after Egypt became part of the Roman Empire in 30BC.

At the end of the fifth century the Roman Empire finally collapsed and the obelisks followed suit, all too literally. In time, they disappeared, as did so many other monuments, under the slowly accumulating debris. The only obelisk to escape this fate stood on the south side of St Peter’s Basilica. A relative youngster, it had been erected in Alexandria at the end of the first century BC, in honour of Augustus. It had been brought to Rome by the emperor’s great grandson, Caligula, and placed in the circus he had built on the Mons Vaticanus. During the first wave of persecutions of the Christians under the reign of Nero, St Peter is thought to have been martyred and buried close to this very monument.

Throughout the Renaissance the idea of  moving the obelisk to a more prominent position was often discussed, but the challenge of moving an object which weighed over 300 tons was a task that no engineer had tackled since ancient times. However, in 1585, a man who did not take no for an answer was elected Pope Sixtus V. In time-honoured fashion, the Pope launched a competition to decide how the obelisk should lowered, moved and re-erected, all without the risk of any damage.

The competition attracted in the region of 500 entries and was won by Domenico Fontana, an architect and engineer who, in equally time-honoured fashion, also happened to be the Pope’s personal friend. During the middle of 1586 the work was finally carried out, taking 900 men and 140 horses five months to move the obelisk a distance of  little more than one hundred metres. This feat helps put into perspective the scale of the achievement of the ancient Romans, who had managed to transport the obelisks all the way from Egypt, a distance of over one thousand miles! Being a pagan monument, the obelisk was duly exorcised by the Pope before being decorated with a cross and symbols from the papal coat of arms.

In 1587, the first obelisk that Augustus had brought back to the city was unearthed, broken into several pieces, in the Circus Maximus, where it had lain for a thousand years. Pope Sixtus V lost no time in exploiting the newly developed skills of his favourite architect in having it repaired and re-erected in the Piazza del Popolo, the point at which three streets converge to form the so-called Trident. The Pope could see the full, visual impact of a tall, tapering pillar, as he embarked on his programme of urban regeneration. Accordingly, he placed two more obelisks at focal points along the road he created to link some of the city’s major churches.

The obelisk that stands at the back of San Giovanni in Laterano happens to be the largest in the world and was the last to arrive in Rome. It originally stood in Thebes and both the emperors, Augustus and Constantine, toyed with the idea of transferring it to Rome. It was left to Constantine’s son, Constantius II, to turn the idea into reality with the help of a specially built boat powered by 300 oarsmen. The obelisk arrived in Rome in 357AD and was duly placed in the Circus Maximus alongside that of Augustus.

None of the obelisks stand today where they were first erected in ancient Rome. Most occupy prominent positions throughout the city, but one is much less easily tracked down. Its original companion sits in splendour on top of the fountain opposite the Pantheon, but this one sits, forlorn and neglected, in a run down corner of the Villa Celimontana.

People whose memories of Rome go back to the years before 2004 will know that the city’s tally of obelisks was once fourteen not thirteen. It too was a spoil of war, it too came from Africa. However in this case the country was not Egypt, but Ethiopia or Abysinnia, as it was then called. In 1935-6 the country was conquered by Mussolini’s fascists as part of Il Duce’s imperial ambitions and a year later an obelisk was moved from the ancient city of Axum to Rome.

It was placed outside the Ministry of Italian Africa, now the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, where it stood for the next seventy years. As soon as the war was over, the Ethiopians demanded the return of their obelisk, a demand the Italian government quickly agreed to, in 1947. But, for a variety of reasons, nothing happened until 2004 when the obelisk was cut into three pieces and finally flown back home.

The restitution of the Axum Obelisk does not seem to have prompted the Egyptian authorities to follow suit and call for the return of any or all of their own obelisks. So for the forseeable future Rome will continue to be home to the greatest concentration of obelisks in the world.