BY JOSEPH WHITLEY, LEEDS, DATED 1881

The obelisk now known as London’s Cleopatra’s Needle was first perched upright in about 1450 BC in Heliopolis, on the order of Pharoah Thutmose III. In 12 BC, Roman Emperor Augustus, having defeated Egypt 18 years earlier, directed the stele be floated down the Nile to Alexandria, where it was re-erected. 1,890 years later, in 1878, the red Aswan granite pinnacle was pivoted into place along the Thames, a gift of Egypt’s ruler, in thanks for England’s vanquishing of the French at the Battles of the Nile and Alexandria in 1801.