Location: Square of Horses, Istanbul, Turkey

Pharaoh: Tuthmosis III (reigned 1504-1450 B.C.)

Height: 65 feet (originally 95 feet)

Weight: (originally 380 tons)

Story: Now standing in the Square of Horses in Istanbul, this obelisk once graced the Great Temple of Karnak in ancient Thebes. It was one of two erected near the Seventh Pylon by Tuthmosis III, whose inscriptions glorify his military exploits, including a crossing of the river Euphrates in Syria: "Crossing the Great Circle of Naharina in valor and victory at the head of his army, making great slaughter...Lord of Victory who subdues all lands, establishing his frontier at the Beginning

of the Earth [the extreme south] up to the Swampy Lands of Naharina [the farthest north]...."

No one knows who ordered its removal from Karnak, or whether it was still standing when it was taken. Now about 65 feet tall, its lower half reputedly also once stood in Istanbul but is now lost. Unlike the obelisks in Rome, it appears to have stood unmoved in the former Hippodrome of Constantinople since its erection by an unidentified Roman emperor

Pharaoh: Tuthmosis III (reigned 1504-1450 B.C.)

Height: 105.6 feet

Weight: 455 tons

Story: The so-called Lateran obelisk is the largest standing obelisk in the world. Its inscriptions state that while it was begun during the reign of Tuthmosis III, it lay in the craftsmen's workshops for 35 years and was finally erected by his grandson Tuthmosis IV. The only single obelisk ever put up in Karnak Temple (obelisks usually came in pairs), it was removed under the orders of the Roman emperor Constantine (A.D. 274-337), who hoped to raise it in his new capital at Constantinople. He died before the obelisk ever left Egypt, and his son and successor Constantius (A.D. 317-361) had it taken to Rome, where it was re-erected in the Circus Maximus.

At some unknown date and by some unknown cause, the obelisk fell. It was not until the 16th century that Pope Sixtus V ordered a search for the monolith. It was found, in three pieces, some 23 feet down in the former Circus Maximus. On August 3, 1588, after more than a year of effort, the Lateran obelisk was raised in the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, where it has stood ever since, a Christian cross at its apex.

Pharaoh: Unknown

Height: 83 feet

Weight: 331 tons

Story: This obelisk, like two others in Rome, is uninscribed, and no one knows where it originally came from or who created it. It is known that Emperor Augustus ordered it erected in the Julian Forum in Alexandria, where it stayed until A.D. 37. That year, the Emperor Caligula had it removed to the Vatican Circus in Rome. According to the Egyptologist Labib Habachi, "Legend has it that in the Vatican Circus innumerable Christians, including St. Peter, were put to death and that the reason this obelisk was not later overturned as were all the others in Rome was that it was looked upon as the last witness to the martyrdom of St. Peter."

In the 16th century, the Pope Sixtus V directed the obelisk to be re-erected in the collonnaded square before the Basilica of St. Peter, where it remains to this day. During its relocation, workers carefully inspected the metal globe that had stood atop the obelisk since Roman times. They were looking for the remains of Caesar, which were reputedly cached there, but they found only dust. After the successful re-erection, triumphant Romans carried the chief engineer, Domenico Fontana, on their shoulders all the way to his home.

Pharaoh: Seti I (reigned 1318-1304 B.C.)

Height: 75 feet

Weight: 263 tons

Story: Seti I decorated three sides of this obelisk, while his son Ramses II carved the fourth and erected the obelisk in the sun temple at Heliopolis, a capital of ancient Egypt. In inscriptions on one side of the monolith, Seti I describes himself as "the one who fills Heliopolis with obelisks that their rays may illuminate the Temple of Re." Ramses II, one of history's greatest self-aggrandizers, styled himself as one who made "monuments as innumerable as the stars of heaven. His works join the sky. When Re shines, he rejoices because of [the obelisks] in his temple of millions of years."

In 10 B.C., the obelisk was re-erected at the Circus Maximus in Rome to celebrate Augustus' conquest of Egypt. Sometime later it toppled, to be resurrected in the 16th century under Pope Sixtus V. In 1589, it became the centerpiece of the Piazza del Popola in Rome, where three major avenues of the city converge.

Pharaoh: Psammetikos II (reigned 595-589 B.C.)

Height: 72 feet

Weight: 230 tons

Story: Psammetikos II, the third king of the 26th Dynasty (666-524 A.D.), erected this obelisk at Heliopolis near Cairo. Many of the inscriptions have eroded away, though a list of the king's many names remains: "The Golden Horus, 'beautifying the Two Lands,' beloved of Atum, lord of Heliopolis; the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Neferibre, beloved of Re-Harakhti; the son of his own body, who seizes the White Crown and who unites the Double Crown, Psammetikos, beloved of the Souls of Heliopolis."

Like the obelisk at the Piazza del Popolo, this obelisk was re-erected in Rome in 10 B.C. to commemorate the emperor Augustus' victories in Egypt. It remained there, in the Campus Martius, for many centuries before falling over in the 10th or 11th century. It wasn't until the 18th century that it was finally restored and re-erected at Monte Citorio.

For 1400 years, no one knew how to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. Virtually all understanding of this mysterious script had been lost since the 4th century AD. The breakthrough to the decipherment of hieroglyphs came in 1799, a year after Napoleon's armies successfully captured the Egyptian Nile Delta. A French soldier, while working at a fort on the Rosetta branch of the Nile River, found a black basalt stone slab carved with inscriptions that would change the course of Egyptology.

The Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum) was carved with an inscription in three different scripts: Egyptian hieroglyphs at the top, demotic script (a late cursive form of hieroglyphs) in the middle, and Greek at the bottom. The translation of the Greek passage revealed that the inscription was a royal edict issued on March 27, 196 BC. The decree recorded the benefits conferred on Egypt by the 13-year-old pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes at the time of his coronation. The Greek inscription was a translation of the upper two Egyptian passages and thus provided the key to deciphering ancient hieroglyphs. Copies of the Rosetta Stone inscription were sent to linguistic experts in Europe. The final breakthrough was made by the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion (shown nearby) who published his results in 1822.

The French scholar Jean François Champollion unlocked the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs. A brilliant linguist, Champollion began his work on the Rosetta Stone inscriptions (shown nearby) in 1808 at age 18. After 14 years of study, he finally deciphered the hieroglyphs. The results of his great achievement were announced in 1822 in a now famous letter he wrote to the French Royal Academy of Inscriptions, in which he explained the basic concepts of hieroglyphic script.

Champollion based his approach to deciphering hieroglyphs on three fundamental and brilliant assumptions:

1-The later Egyptian Coptic script represented the final stage of the ancient language of the pharaohs.

2-Hieroglyphs were used both as ideograms (pictures that represent a concept or thing) and as phonograms (pictures that represent sounds).

3-Hieroglyphs enclosed in a cartouche (an oval-shaped loop encircling a group of hieroglyphs) were phonetic transcriptions of the pharaohs' names.

Finally after nearly 1500 years of silence, ancient Egyptian writing could be read!

Location: Victoria Embankment, London, England

Pharaoh: Tuthmosis III (reigned 1504-1450 B.C.)

Height: 69 feet

Weight: 187 tons

Story: The British first began to consider appropriating this obelisk, which had originally stood in the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis, after the French were defeated at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. But it was not until the 1870s, when the soldier-turned-writer General James Alexander took up the cause, that serious efforts were made to collect it. After much negotiation and preliminary work, "Cleopatra's Needle" -- as this and its companion, now in New York, were dubbed -- was loaded aboard a special barge and towed to England.

Disaster struck in the Bay of Biscay, when a gale separated the barge, the Cleopatra, from its mother ship, the Olga. In their attempt to secure the barge to the Olga, a number of seamen were lost, and the barge was finally set adrift. Coming upon it on the high seas, a Glasgow steamer towed it into port. In January 1878, the Cleopatra was finally pulled up the Thames and moored near the Houses of Parliament. Eight months later, on September 13th, its precious cargo was raised on the Victoria Embankment, where it may be seen today.

Location: Central Park, New York, USA

Pharaoh: Tuthmosis III (reigned 1504-1450 B.C.)

Height: 70 feet

Weight: 193 tons

Story: After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the ruler of Egypt, the Khedive Ismail, promised the United States an obelisk. Henry Gorridge, a lieutenant commander of the U.S. Navy, was appointed the task of transporting it to New York from its pedestal in Alexandria. (It had been moved to Alexandria from Heliopolis, where Tuthmosis III had erected it alongside its companion, which is now in London.)

The obelisk and its 50-ton pedestal arrived at the Quarantine Station in New York in July 1880. It took 32 horses hitched in 16 pairs to drag the pedestal alone through the streets of the city. Once the pedestal was in place on the summit of the Graywacke Knoll in Central Park, the obelisk was then hauled through Manhattan. It traveled at the rate of 97 feet a day, taking 112 days to arrive at the knoll. The shaft was raised in January 1881 before more than 10,000 jubilant New Yorkers.

At the raising, William Maxwell Evarts, then U.S. Secretary of State, declared, "Who indeed can tell what our nation will do if any perversity is possible of realization; and yet this obelisk may ask us, 'Can you expect to flourish forever? Can you expect wealth to accumulate and man not decay? Can you think that the soft folds of luxury are to wrap themselves closer and closer around this nation and the pith and vigor of its manhood know no decay? Can it creep over you and yet the nation know no decrepitude?' These are questions that may be answered in the time of the obelisk but not in ours."

Location: Place de la Concorde, Paris, France

Pharaoh: Ramses II (reigned 1304-1237 B.C.)

Height: 74 feet

Weight: 227 tons

Story: Legend has it that Josephine's parting words to Napoleon before he began his failed conquest of Egypt in 1798 were: "If you go to Thebes, do send me a little obelisk." Whether or not the story is true, Napoleon's expedition first left France desiring an obelisk of its own, though it wasn't until 1831 that the moment arrived. That year, a French naval engineer named Jean Baptiste Apollinaire Lebas secured permission from the then-ruler of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, to make off with Ramses the Great's pair of obelisks before Luxor Temple.

Fortunately, it was all Lebas could do to take the western one. (The eastern obelisk remains at Luxor.) In the 3,000 years since Ramses had raised the obelisk, the area around it, including the temple itself, had filled up with earth, houses, and streets. Lebas had this cleared amidst summer heat that could reach 120°F. In the end, it took two months to get the obelisk down and on board the ship Louxor, and another three years before Lebas successfully re-erected it in the Place de la Concorde in Paris