ecessor. These sculptures tell us of monarchs who had
reigned, and conquered, and died long before the mythic times, when
the "pious AEneas," as Virgil tells us, landed on the Italian shore,
and Romulus ploughed his significant furrow round the Palatine Hill. A
thousand years before the foundation of Rome, and two thousand years
before the Christian era, it had been excavated from the quarries of
Syene and worshipped at Heliopolis. It was as old to the Caesars as the
days of the Caesars are to us. Pliny tells us that the work of
quarrying, conveying, and setting it up employed twenty thousand men;
and there is a dim tradition that so anxious was the king for its
safety, when it was erected, that in order to ensure this he bound his
own son to the top of it. A close examination of the hieroglyphics
reveals the curious fact that the name of the god Amen wherever it
occurs, is more deeply carved than the other figures, in order to
obliterate the name of some other deity which had previously occupied
its place. It is supposed that this circumstance indicates a
theological revolution which happened in the history of Egypt when
Amenhotep III., the Memnon of the Greek historian, married an Arabian
wife of the name of Taia, who introduced her own religion into her
adopted country, as Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, introduced the worship
of Baal into Israel. When this dynasty was overthrown, in the course
of about fifty years, the old faith was restored, and the names of the
old gods substituted for those which had usurped their place on the
religious monuments. It is supposed that the Lateran obelisk was the
one before which Cambyses, the great Persian conqueror, stood lost in
admiration, arrested in his semi-religious course of destroying the
popular monuments of Egypt. Augustus intended to have removed it to
Rome, but was deterred by the difficulty of the undertaking, and also
by superstitious scruples, because it had been specially dedicated to
the sun, and fixed immovably in his temple. Constantine the Great had
no such scruples, believing, as he said, that "he did no injury to
religion if he removed a wonder from one temple, and again consecrated
it in Rome, the temple of the whole world." He died, however, before
he had completed his design, having succeeded only in transporting the
obelisk to Alexandria, from whence his son and successor Constantius
transferred it to Rome, and placed it on the Spina of the Great
Circus. So cl