It required some true Victorian ingenuity to bring Cleopatra’s Needle from Alexandria to the banks of the Thames.
Photographs to be auctioned next month show it in the final stages of its trip, encased in an iron cylinder, having been transported some 2,000 miles from Egypt in a specially built vessel.
The rare photographs, dating from January 1878, capture the moment when the 69ft-high, 187-ton red granite monument was lifted onto its site on the Thames Embankment.
It had survived an eventful journey. It was given to Britain by Mehmet Ali, the Albanian-born viceroy of Egypt, to commemorate Lord Nelson’s victory over Napoleon in the battle of the Nile in 1798, but the vessel carrying it was caught up in a storm and had to be abandoned before it was safely towed to harbour.
Etched with hieroglyphs, it became known as Cleopatra’s Needle because of its association with her home city, Alexandria, even though it was made in Egypt for Thotmes III, the pharaoh, in 1460BC, about 1,400 years before her reign.
The archive, whose owner wishes to remain anonymous, is expected to raise £20,000 when it is auctioned by the Exeter-based Hampton & Littlewood. It also includes letters that belonged to Waynman Dixon, one of the people responsible for transporting the 3,500-year-old obelisk to Britain.
See the above for more, together with one of the photographs, which is excellent.
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