Obelisks on the Move (2024)

A few months ago, I introduced a granite obelisk from the Museo del Sannio in Benevento, Italy, which is now at the Getty for conservation treatment.

Our project is timely: since my last post, archaeologists have discovered a fragment of the largest-known obelisk from Egypt’s Old Kingdom, dating to about 2350 BC.

Likewise, the Getty Research Institute has recently digitized a collection of 17th-century engravings showing obelisks in Rome.

Obelisks clearly have continued to capture the popular imagination long since their heyday in ancient Egypt. Our desire to possess them, along with the power and monumentality they represent, has not waned.

One of the many questions about ancient obelisks is a logistical one: How did the Egyptians, and then the Romans, manage to transport and erect such massive monuments without the aid of modern technology? In this post I’ll discuss what we know about how obelisks have been moved over time, and give a behind-the-scenes look at how we brought the Museo del Sannio obelisk to Los Angeles.

Moving Egyptian Obelisks

While the specifics of obelisk transportation in ancient Egypt—as well as the movement of other large stone sculptures and blocks—remain somewhat of a mystery, the archaeological record presents us with some clues.

After an obelisk was carved at the quarry site, workmen used ropes to roll it onto a sledge and pull it to the Nile River, where a ship awaited. A glimpse at what this may have looked like comes from a painted scene in the tomb of a man named Djehutihotep, in which a colossal seated statue is tied to a sledge pulled by a large crew of men. One workman, who stands at the statue’s feet, pours water in front of the sledge’s path to make it glide more easily over the sand.

When the ship arrived at its destination, the obelisk was again placed on the sledge and moved to its final home. Raising the obelisk upright and situating it in place probably involved the use of ramps and ropes, but we do not know the exact techniques employed. It certainly required a tremendous amount of labor and would have been a dangerous operation, as we learn from an inscribed stela dating to the reign of Ramesses IV (1153–1147 BC). The inscription describes a stone-quarrying expedition to the Wadi Hammamat in Egypt’s Eastern Desert to procure large stone blocks for the pharaoh’s building projects. Over 9,000 men took part in the expedition (mostly soldiers, temple personnel, and stonecutters), 900 of whom perished during the trip.

Moving Obelisks to Rome

The Romans conquered Egypt in 30 BC and soon began building special ships to bring obelisks to the Italian peninsula.Roman author Pliny the Elder (first century AD) remarked that this undertaking was even more impressive than the obelisks themselves:

But the most difficult enterprise of all was the carriage of these obelisks by sea to Rome, in vessels that excited the greatest admiration. Indeed, the late Emperor Augustus consecrated the one that brought over the first obelisk, as a lasting memorial of this marvelous undertaking, in the docks at Puteoli; but it was destroyed by fire. As to the one in which, by order of the Emperor Caligula, the other obelisk had been transported to Rome, after having been preserved for some years and looked upon as the most wonderful construction ever beheld upon the seas, it was brought to Ostia, by order of the late Emperor Claudius; and towers of Puteolan earth being first erected upon it, it was sunk for the construction of the harbor he was making there.Pliny, Natural History, 36.14

Many obelisks taken to Rome still remain in the Eternal City, though others have traveled even farther from their Egyptian point of origin (think Cleopatra’s Needle in New York’s Central Park). Often, obelisks have enjoyed a third life after having first been carved and erected in Egypt, then taken to Rome, and finally rediscovered and/or repurposed in modern times—the Vatican obelisk is one example.

The Vatican Obelisk

In my last article, I discussed this ivory token in the Getty’s antiquities collection, which may show the uninscribed obelisk that now stands in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican. The emperor Caligula had this obelisk brought to Rome from Egypt in AD 37. Over a millennium and a half later, Pope Sixtus V ordered that the obelisk be relocated from its spot on the ancient Circus of Nero to the square in front of the basilica.

The obelisk only needed to undertake a short journey of 275 feet, but transporting such a massive stone object (83 feet tall and 326 tons, to be exact) even that far was extremely risky, and no one knew how to do it. In fact, rumor has it that an earlier pope, Paul III, repeatedly approached Michelangelo (architect of the new St. Peter’s Basilica) about moving the obelisk—but the artist refused, saying “What if it breaks?”

In 1585 a special committee sent out a call for proposals, and hundreds of engineers flocked to Rome to submit their ideas. In the end, architect Domenico Fontana won out over his many competitors; he designed a wooden tower that would be constructed around the obelisk, connected to a system of ropes and pulleys.

Engraver Natale Bonifacio documented this feat of engineering in a series of fascinating images, some of which are now in the Getty Research Institute’s special collections.

One shows the elaborate cage constructed around the obelisk and depicts the monolith being lowered onto a sledge and then rolled to its new location:

A man-made embankment in the square made it easier to glide the obelisk gradually into position before standing it upright on the spot where it still stands today. The success of the operation inspired the excavation and re-erection of a number of other ancient obelisks in Rome, using the techniques Fontana had developed.

Bringing the Museo del Sannio Obelisk to Los Angeles

Thanks to 21st-century technology, moving the Museo del Sannio obelisk didn’t require any sledges or horses. Still, a team of experts and a great deal of time and manpower were needed to bring it to Los Angeles.

This news article from Benevento shows a team of art handlers de-installing the obelisk in the Museo del Sannio galleries (scroll to the bottom of the article for more photos).

Custom crates were built to safely pack the obelisk and its base, which together weigh about 5,400 pounds, before their flight to Los Angeles and journey to the Getty Villa’s conservation studios.At the Getty, the obelisk, which was shipped in a horizontal position, needed to be removed from its crateand erected.

First, conservator Erik Risser and preparator Kevin Marshall got ready to unpack the obelisk (left) and its base (right).