32 ANNUAL ADDRESS '. 



The exact date is unknown, but it must have been consider* 

 ably before the twelfth dynasty, when Osirtasen, the first 

 monarch of that dynasty, set up the obelisk that still stands 

 on the site. On is said to be a form of the Egyptian Ana, 

 one of the names of the sun-god, usually called Ra, whose 

 chief place of worship was in the city. Hence its Hebrew 

 name Beth-8hemesli (Jer. xliii. 13), "House of the Sun," and 

 the Greek form, Heliopolis, " City of the Sun." The oldest 

 and finest of Egyptian obelisks is that still standing on the 

 site. It was erected, with another exactly similar, at the 

 entrance to the Temple of the Sun, and on it is engraved the 

 name of its founder, Osirtasen I., who lived not later than 

 B.C. 2000 ; Mariette assigns a date 1,000 years earlier. Be 

 this as it may, the obelisk was there when Abraham visited 

 Egypt ; it was there when Joseph ruled the country and 

 married the daughter of Poti-Pherah, priest of On ; it was 

 there when Moses studied in the school of philosophy in the 

 Temple, and became learned in all the wisdom of the 

 Egyptians ; it was there when Plato, as we are told, studied 

 in the same school ; it was there when the infant Jesus was 

 brought down to Egypt in the arms of His tfiother ; it is there 

 still, its tapering shaft rising up all solitary on the long- 

 deserted site. 



About five hundred years after Osirtasen two other obelisks 

 were erected in front of the Temple by Thothmes III., one of 

 the most famous monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty. They 

 both bear the names of their founder, and also of two of his 

 successors, Rameses II. and Seti II. Their history is a 

 romance. They were removed to Alexandria by the Romans, 

 and placed in front of the Temple of Ceesar. The Temple 

 disappeared, but they remained. In process of time one fell. 

 I saw them thus on my first visit to Alexandria. The fallen 

 obelisk was given by Mehemed Ali to the English nation in 

 1819. Its subsequent story is well known, — how a special 

 ship was built for it by the munificence of Erasmus Wilson, 

 how it was cast adrift in the Bay of Biscay, how it was 

 recovered and brought to England, and how it now stands on 

 the Thames Embankment. Its companion was given to the 

 Uoited States of America, and forms one of the chief orna- 

 ments of the Public Park, New York. 



These are not the only obelisks of which Egypt has been 

 robbed. One which formerly stood before the great temple 

 of Luxor is now in the Place de la Concorde, Pai-is ; another 

 of Thothmes III., from Thebes, adorns the grand area of the 

 Lateran in Rome; another, also from Thebes, is in the Meidan 

 of Constantinople. One cannot but lament the removal of 



