Egyptians are upset by Britain’s disregard for a gift - Obelisk diplomacy

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/10/06/egyptians-are-upset-by-britains-disregard-for-a-gift

Obelisk diplomacyEgyptians are upset by Britain's disregard for a gift

London's ancient obelisk is popular among pigeons, but not people

Oct 4th 2018

FOR two millennia Europeans have prized ancient Egyptian obelisks. Roman emperors placed captured obelisks in temples in Rome. Pope Sixtus V unearthed one and placed it in St Peter's Square, the Vatican's forecourt. Ottoman sultans redesigned Istanbul around them. King Louis Philippe of France made one the centrepiece of the world's most elegantly planned city.

Not so the British. Muhammad Ali Pasha, the founder of modern Egypt, gave Britain a 3,500-year-old obelisk as a gift in 1819. But efforts to honour the bicentennial have fallen on deaf ears. The office of London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, refers requests for an Anglo-Egyptian festival to a website for frequently asked questions. Follow-up inquiries go unanswered.

The snub has not gone unnoticed. Egypt's press protests against this ingratitude and calls for the obelisk's return. Visiting Egyptian officials are shocked that it is hidden by trees on the banks of the Thames, covered in pigeon droppings and bereft of helpful signs. "If the mayor of London isn't interested in the obelisk, he does not deserve to have it, and it should come back," says Zahi Hawass, a former head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Britain has never seemed especially fond of the obelisk. Its prime minister in 1819, Lord Liverpool, decried the expense of shipping the 200-tonne icon. So it sat in Alexandria for decades. The boat that collected it in 1877 nearly lost it in a storm off the Bay of Biscay. When it finally sailed up the Thames it was left on the riverbank, contemplating mudflats. Like the Paris one, it was given the homely title of Cleopatra's Needle. The pink granite turned black in the smog and was later dwarfed by Art Deco mansions. Bomb damage in the second world war was never repaired.

The London obelisk is one of a pair. The other was given to America—and has also been largely forgotten. It sits in a lonely corner of Central Park in New York. But America, at least, placed an obelisk on its dollar bill and erected a bigger one in Washington, DC. Britain seems more enamoured of columns.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Obloquy for an obelisk"

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