Cleopatra's Needle

Cleopatra's Needle in New York stands in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is, at roughly 3,500 years old, the oldest man-made object in the city. The 21-metre granite obelisk was raised in Heliopolis around 1450 BC under Pharaoh Thutmose III, then moved to Alexandria under Augustus in 12 BC, sharing its history there with its twin which now stands by the Thames in London. In 1881 the Ottoman Khedive Ismail Pasha presented the obelisk to the City of New York; transporting it across the Atlantic and up Manhattan cost William H. Vanderbilt about 100,000 dollars. The hieroglyphs carved into the shaft have eroded badly from weather and industrial pollution, prompting a major conservation campaign by the Smithsonian Institution in 2014. The obelisk stands freely accessible in the park; a bronze plaque at the base offers English transcriptions of the hieroglyphs.