Philae Obelisk

Stand still for a moment on the soft grass of the south lawn. Under your feet the ground is pure Dorset: damp, green, and smelling faintly of cut turf. In front of you rises a slender shaft of pinkish stone, tapering to a point against an English sky. Rooks call from the old trees. It looks calm and settled here. But this stone spent more than two thousand years beside the Nile before it ever saw rain like this.

This is the Philae Obelisk. It stands in the grounds of Kingston Lacy, the country house estate near Wimborne Minster, a short drive north of Poole. It came from Philae, a small island in the Nile in southern Egypt. In the ancient world, Philae was a sacred place. It held a great temple to Isis, the Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood and healing. For centuries, pilgrims travelled up the river to worship there.

The stone belongs to the age of the Ptolemies. This was a Greek-speaking royal family who ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. They were foreign kings, but they presented themselves as pharaohs. They built temples in the old Egyptian style and honoured Egyptian gods. The obelisk was raised during the second century before Christ. It shows that mixed world very clearly, because it carries writing in two languages.

The story of how it reached Dorset begins with one man, William John Bankes. Bankes was the heir to Kingston Lacy. He was wealthy, restless and very curious. As a young man he travelled widely in Egypt and the Near East. He sketched temples, copied inscriptions and collected objects. In 1815 he visited Philae and saw this obelisk lying near the temple. He decided he wanted it for his family home.

Moving it was a serious task. Bankes arranged help from Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian adventurer and former circus strongman who had become a skilled mover of ancient monuments. The obelisk was taken down the Nile by boat. There was at least one dramatic moment when the heavy stone slipped into the river and had to be recovered. Eventually it was shipped to England. The journey took several years from start to finish.

Here is the first surprise. The foundation stone for the obelisk at Kingston Lacy was laid in 1827 by the Duke of Wellington. This was the same Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. He was a friend of Bankes. So a soldier famous for a European battlefield helped to set an Egyptian monument into an English lawn. The shaft itself was raised on its base some years later.

Now look more closely at the stone. On the shaft, you can see carved Egyptian hieroglyphs, the picture-writing of the ancient temples. On the base, there is writing in ancient Greek. The Greek text records a petition from the priests of Isis at Philae to the ruling king and queen. The priests complained that visiting officials and soldiers stayed at the temple and expected to be fed. This was expensive. They asked to be freed from that burden.

It is a very human document. Behind the sacred symbols, there is a complaint about costs and unwelcome guests. The king agreed to the request, and the priests recorded the decision in stone. So this object is not only a religious monument. It is also a record of everyday politics, money and the relationship between a temple and the state. Most visitors walk past without knowing what the writing says.

The second surprise is even bigger. This obelisk played a part in one of the great puzzles of history — reading Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the early nineteenth century, nobody could read them. Scholars knew the Rosetta Stone, which also has Egyptian and Greek texts. Bankes studied his obelisk and noticed something important. In the Greek text he found the name Cleopatra. In the hieroglyphs, he found a name inside an oval frame, called a cartouche. He suggested they matched.

Copies of the inscriptions reached Jean-François Champollion, the French scholar who finally cracked the hieroglyphic script. The name of Cleopatra helped him to confirm the sounds of several signs. The two languages here are not an exact translation of each other, but the royal names gave a vital clue. So this quiet stone in a Dorset garden helped to open the door to ancient Egyptian writing.

Bankes himself had a sad ending to his story. In 1841 he faced prosecution after a scandal involving a relationship with another man, which was then a crime in England. He fled abroad and lived in exile, mostly in Italy. He could not legally return. Yet he kept directing work on Kingston Lacy through letters. He sent instructions, plans and objects home for the house he would never openly live in again.

Today the obelisk stands as part of a wider Egyptian collection at Kingston Lacy. Inside the house, there are more objects Bankes brought back from his travels. Out here, the setting is very English: lawns, old trees, and the long, pale front of the house. The contrast is part of the experience. A temple stone from the Nile stands among oaks and cedars, under grey Atlantic clouds.

Before you move on, walk slowly around the base. Notice how the light changes the colour of the granite, from rose to grey as clouds pass. Look for the worn edges of the Greek letters and the sharper forms of the hieroglyphs above them. Listen to the wind in the trees and the voices on the lawn. And as you walk back towards the house, remember the priests of Isis, worried about their bills, whose complaint still stands here, far from home.