Of the ancient Egyptian obelisks still in existence, our database counts 33. Just 15 of them remain in Egypt. The other 18 stand somewhere else — nine in Italy, plus one more in Vatican City, four in the United Kingdom, and one each in France, the United States, Turkey and Poland.
The single tallest ancient Egyptian obelisk still standing anywhere in the world is the Lateran Obelisk, at 32.18 metres. It was cut for Karnak and raised under Thutmose III and Thutmose IV, and it now stands in Rome. Rome collected them deliberately: after Octavian annexed Egypt in 31 BCE, obelisks became imperial trophies, shipped north to decorate a capital that wanted to look like the heir of the pharaohs.
The nineteenth century took a politer approach and called them gifts. The pair known as Cleopatra’s Needles — both raised by Thutmose III at Heliopolis, and both misleadingly named, since they predate Cleopatra VII by some 1,400 years — were re-erected in London in 1878 and in New York in 1881. One of the two Luxor obelisks of Ramesses II left for Paris in the 1830s; its twin still stands at the temple entrance where the pair began. Whole buildings travelled too: the Temple of Debod now stands in Madrid, moved during the UNESCO campaign to rescue Nubian monuments from the water rising behind the Aswan High Dam.
Two obelisks in Egypt are worth knowing for opposite reasons. At Heliopolis, now the Cairo suburb of Matariya, the 20.40 metre obelisk of Senusret I is the oldest still standing in the place where it was raised, nearly four thousand years on. And at Aswan lies the largest of them all, the Unfinished Obelisk, at almost 42 metres — which nobody ever saw upright, because it cracked while still attached to the bedrock and was simply abandoned in the quarry.
Egypt has not stopped moving them. In 2020 a Ramesses II obelisk from Tanis was re-erected in Tahrir Square in central Cairo. It is a small reversal of a very long pattern: for two millennia these stones travelled outward, and this one came back into the middle of the city.
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