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“I defeated you, death of songs in Mesopotamia / Egyptian obelisks / Pharaoh tombs / inscriptions on temple stones I defeated you, you emerged victorious / Eternity escaped your ambush.” These are the words of Mahmoud Darwish in Fresco, as if he meant that people die, but their traces do not disappear with death. No civilization celebrated death rituals like the Pharaohs, but the people of that civilization had their sights not on death itself, but on its opposite: immortality, something they had desired, something that had been achieved for them. Here are their pyramids, temples, and obelisks, eternal evidence of a civilization that transcended time.
The obelisk, in particular, is one of the symbols of Pharaonic civilization and an important element in its architecture, since they were placed at the entrances on both sides of the temples and they were mostly carved from a single block of stone from the granite quarries of Aswan. Although some sources indicate that other civilizations, including the Assyrians, also knew obelisks, no country can rival Egypt in the number of obelisks associated with ancient Egyptian mythology, since the obelisk was considered a sacred stone, symbolizing the sun god Ra, and in the time of Akhenaten it was said to be the petrified rays of the furnace, the disk of the sun.
Many Egyptian obelisks found their way to different countries of the world, especially in Europe, and it is said that the “migration” of these obelisks to foreign countries is not a recent thing, the Romans were so impressed by these obelisks that they brought many of them to Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire.
As in previous years, France celebrated its National Day on July 14, in the Place de la Concorde in the capital, Paris, in front of the ancient Egyptian obelisk that was brought from the Luxor Temple on November 29, 1830. On that day, the Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali Pasha presented it as a gift to the French King Louis Philippe I to express the friendship between the two countries and to pay tribute to the efforts of the French. Scientist Jean-François Champollion learned the secrets of ancient Egyptian writing. The obelisk dates back to the time of King Ramses II, the most famous of the pharaohs, and was destined to witness many political events in France from the 19th century to the present day.
According to Wael Gamal’s article about the obelisk, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, one of the most prominent pioneers of Egypt’s intellectual renaissance in the 19th century, was the first to oppose the transfer of the obelisk upon his return from Egypt. He considered the move a waste of national wealth and recorded his objections in his book, “Summary of the Rescue of Ibriz in Paris,” in which he wrote: “Egypt has now taken the means of civilization and learning like the nations of Europe, and it is more worthy and deserving of what its predecessors have left behind in ornamentation and industry, and to take something from it after something else would be like usurpation.”
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