170 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. visited the country and found a monumental type so unlike any- thing- they had at home, wished to convey a good Idea of it to their compatriots ; they accordingly made use of the word h/3eos, a spindle. It is difficult to understand how their de- scendants came to prefer o^eXtaKo^, a little spindle.^ A diminutive hardly seems the right kind of word under the circumstances ; an augmentative would, perhaps, have been better. But it was this diminutive that the Romans borrowed from the Greeks of Alexandria and transmitted to the modern world. This is not the place for an inquiry into the meaning of the obelisk. It may symbolize, as we have often been told, the ray of the sun, or it may be an emblem of Amen-Generator.^ It seems to be well established, that in the time of the New Empire at least, it was used to write the syllable ?uen, which signified Jirnniess or stability.^" The usual situation of the obelisks was in front of the first pylon of the temples. There they stood in couples, one upon each side of the entrance. Those instances where they are found, as at Karnak, surrounded by the buildings of the temple, are easily explained. The two obelisks in the caryatid court were erected during the eighteenth dynasty, at a time when those parts of the temple which lie between the obelisks and the outer wall were not yet in existence. The obelisks of Hatasu, when first erected, were in front of the Temple of Amen as it was left by the early sovereigns of the eighteenth dynasty. But the obelisk was not the exclusive property of the temples. Some little ones of limestone have been found in the mastabas,^ and Mariette has described those which formerly stood in front of the royal tombs belonging to the eleventh dynasty, in the Theban necropolis. He has published the inscription which covers the four faces of one of these obelisks, a monolith some ten feet nine only used the expression, o/3eA.os. 'Ev roi re/xeVtt dfSeXol io-rdo-L /xeydXoL XlOlvol (ii. 172 ; also ii. III). ' DiODORUS (i. 57, 59), always uses the word o/SeXaxKos. The termination is certainly that of a diminutive. See Au. ReGxier, Traife dc la Formation dcs Mots dafis la Langue Grecquc, p. 207. - De Rouge, Etnde sur les Monuments de Karnak. 3 PiERRET, Didionnaire d' Archeologie Egyptienne.
- A small funerary obelisk, about two feet high, is now in the museum of Berlin.
It is figured in the Doikmcckr, part ii. pi. 88. It was found in a Cizeh tomb dating from the fifth dynasty.
