undutiful successor Thothmes III, which now stands in front of St. John Lateran at Rome, and which measures 1051⁄2 feet. Hatshepsut has left us her account of how she was prompted to erect the obelisks-"I was sitting in my palace, I was thinking of my Creator, when my heart urged me to make for him two obelisks of electrum [gold-silver alloy, with which the obelisks were either overlaid, or at least tipped], whose points reach unto the sky." It is a pretty touch of piety,-if only she had been a little more regardful of filial piety as well.

The inscription goes on to say that the time occupied in the work was seven months, either "from the ordering of it in the quarry," or "making seven months of exaction in the mountain." If the first reading is correct, and the whole work of quarrying, transit, hewing, sculpturing, and erecting the great 300-ton blocks was finished in such a time, it is nothing short of a marvel; and even if the seven months refers only to the quarrying of the blocks, such expedition is sufficiently remarkable. Thothmes III, carrying on the amiable family tradition which Hatshepsut had established, sheathed the lower part of the great queen's obelisks in masonry, so that her inscriptions should not be seen. In so doing he has unwittingly contributed to their preservation; his sheathing has now fallen down, and the inscription can be read probably all the more clearly for being protected so long.

The fate of the obelisks of Thothmes III himself is sufficiently curious. He reared them all over Egypt; but not one solitary shaft remains where he placed it. One of

the finest of them, as we have seen, is in Rome; one of the pair which stood before the temple at Heliopolis now adorns the Thames Embankment, and is known as "Cleopatra's Needle" to millions of Londoners to whom the far greater personage who actually reared it is not even a name; while its twin is in Central Park, New York. What is perhaps the most interesting of them all is the stunted shaft, 61 feet in height, and 199 tons in weight, which stands in the centre of the ancient Hippodrome at Constantinople, near to the famous Serpent Column, on which are recorded the names of the Greek cities and tribes which fought against Persia at Platæa. Manifestly this is only the fragment of a far larger shaft, and Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that though it is said to have come from Heliopolis, its size, were it complete to the length which its proportions require, and the fact that it is dedicated, not to the SunGod of Heliopolis, but to Amen of Thebes, make it probable that this is a piece of one of the two gigantic obelisks, 185 feet in height, which as we know from an inscription in the temple at Der-el-Bahri, Thothmes erected before Queen Hatshepsut's beautiful "paradise of Amen." If this is the case, then the Constantinople obelisk, when complete, must have weighed about 800 tons, and must have been by far the largest, though not the heaviest stone ever dealt with by human hands. Hatshepsut thought it necessary to swear a great oath that her two 971⁄2 feet shafts were each "of one block of enduring granite, without seam or joining”; but they were very small affairs beside these monsters of her successor. Captain Engelbach has recently calculated

(Ancient Egypt, IV, 1922) the strain on an obelisk of the dimensions mentioned, and finds it to be 5120 pounds per square inch-an impossible figure, as granite breaks at 1500 pounds per square inch. An obelisk of 100 cubits high (or 172 feet), would need to be 36 feet square at the base, and 19 at the tip, and would weigh 11,000 tons! Some other explanation must therefore, as Professor Petrie indicates, be found for the still greater height ascribed to the obelisks -108 cubits.*

Karnak owed many of its finest chambers to the piety with which Thothmes attributed his unvarying success as a soldier to Amen. At the east end of the temple he built a great Festal Hall, 144 feet by 52, whose columns have the peculiarity, more curious than beautiful, of tapering downwards, instead of upwards, while their capitals follow the same inverted rule, and appear like bells standing on their mouths. The idea of the downward taper may have been borrowed from Minoan practice, where, of course, it was general. Minoan influence, as we learn from the tombs of Hatshepsut's factotum Senmut, and Thothmes' vizier, Rekh-ma-ra, was never stronger than during the last half century before its eclipse by the sack of Knossos, and perhaps Thothmes got his idea from the "Men from the Back of Beyond." The feature, however, did not commend itself to Egyptian taste and was never repeated. Besides

Capt. Engelbach explains (Ancient Egypt, Part II, 1923, p. 62) that by a slip in his calculation the amount of the stress is exactly double what it should be-i.e., the actual stress is 2560 pounds per square inch, instead of 5120. This of course correspondingly reduces the dimensions of the obelisk necessary to sustain the stress, but still leaves these beyond the bounds of reasonable size.