Yesterday I visited Cleopatra's Needle, a very underrated monument in New York City's Central Park. It is an enormous stone obelisk that was first erected in the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis in 1475 BC (one and a half thousand years before Cleopatra was born). This three and a half thousand year old structure survived for millennia in Egypt's desert before it was carted off to the United States and installed in Central Park in 1881. Can you imagine what this monolith has lived through? It has seen the rise and fall of some of the great bronze age and iron age civilizations of Mesopotamia. It has survived the conquest of Egypt by the Assyrians and the Persians, by Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans and the Europeans!! If only this megalith could speak!
Unfortunately the last 140 years of exposure to NYC's rain, pollution and wind have done far more to damage it than the sands of Egypt could in thousands of years. Today large portions of its surface have been weathered away so much that many of its hieroglyphic inscriptions have been irreversibly lost to us. In 2010 the Egyptian minister of state for antiques wrote to the central park authorities urging them to take better care of the monument or that he would "take the necessary steps to bring this precious artifact home and save it from ruin". It pains me to see such ancient works of art and architecture being destroyed or being neglected and left to the mercy of the elements.
It makes me very unhappy when I see ancient monuments in India left to crumble because the local authorities cannot afford to pay for their upkeep, but it breaks my heart to see this in a rich, developed country like the US, where the government can easily allocate resources to better preserve their monuments. I hope this structure survives for thousands of years more so that our descendants can visit this obelisk and hear the voices of scribes from somewhere at the dawn of human civilization.
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