VI

THE EGYPTIAN OBELISKS

Among the first objects that arrest the attention and powerfully
excite the curiosity of the visitor in Rome are the Egyptian obelisks.
They remind him impressively that the oldest things in this city of
ages are but as of yesterday in comparison with these imperishable
relics of the earliest civilisation. At one time it is said that there
were no less than forty-eight obelisks erected in Rome,--six of the
largest size and forty-two of the smaller,--all conveyed at enormous
cost and with almost incredible labour from the banks of the Nile to
the banks of the Tiber. Upwards of thirty of them have perished
without leaving any trace behind. They are doubtless buried deep under
the ruins of ancient Rome, but the chance of their disinterment is
very problematical. One obelisk, indeed, was exposed a hundred and
forty years ago in the square of the principal church of the Jesuits,
near the Pantheon; but being found to be broken, and also to underlie
a corner of the church and the greater part of an adjoining palace, so
that it could not be extracted without seriously injuring these
buildings, it was covered up again, and was thus lost to the world. As
it is, we find in Rome the largest collection of obelisks that exists
at the present day in the world, and the best field for studying them.

Obelisks were dedicated to the sun, which was the central object of
worship, and occupied the most conspicuous position in the religious
system of the oldest nations. Sun-worship, that which waited upon some
hill-top to catch the first beams of the morning that created a new
day, is the oldest and the most natural of all kinds of worship. He
was adored as the source of all the life and motion and force in the
world by the most primitive people; and we find numerous traces of
this ancient sun-worship in the rude stone monuments, with their
cup-shaped symbols, that have survived on our moors, in many of the
old customs which still linger in our Christianity, and in the name by
which the most sacred day of the week is commonly known among us. All
the benefits conferred upon our world by the sun must have been
strikingly apparent to the ancient Egyptians, dwelling in a land
exposed to the sun's vertical rays, and clothed with almost tropical
beauty and luxuriance. When they watched the ebbing of the overflowing
waters of the Nile, and saw the moist earth on which the sun's rays
fell, quickened at once into a mar