Obelisks of Nectanebo II

The obelisks you are approaching belong to the era of Nectanebo the Second, the very last native Egyptian to rule as pharaoh. Standing today as weathered fragments in the Great Court of the British Museum, these two monuments represent a final, desperate burst of artistic brilliance before the country fell to foreign powers. They are carved not from the massive granite favored by earlier kings, but from black siltstone, a dense, dark rock that was both easier to shape and deeply symbolic of the fertile soil along the Nile. By the time Nectanebo commissioned them around three hundred and fifty before the common era, his dynasty was struggling to hold onto a crumbling kingdom, yet he still poured resources into these dedicated tributes to Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing.