Secrets Of Lost Empires 2. Obelisk (1 of 23)

Secrets Of Lost Empires 2. Obelisk

3,500 years ago, a glorious era dawned in ancient Egypt called the New Kingdom.
With wealth pouring in from her conquests abroad, Egypt's builders and craftsmen achieved perfection in stone and gold.
A line of pharaohs with memorable names ruled the land: Tutankhamun, Thutmoses, Amen-Hotep, and most illustrious of all, Ramses the Great.
The pharaohs believed themselves to be God-Kings, and their greatest fear was to lose their place in the afterlife.
In the quest for eternal life, the pharaoh had to insure the preservation of both his body and his name.
The fear of being forgotten was so strong, that the pharaohs spent much of their lives creating memorials to themselves in stone.

The most spectacular of these monuments were at Thebes, the heart of the New Kingdom.
A thousand years earlier, the desire for immortality had led to the construction of the pyramids.
But these mountains of stone were vulnerable to grave robbers.
So the pharaohs of the New Kingdom hid their tombs in the isolated Valley of the Kings, below a pyramid-shaped hill.
The passion for building on a gigantic scale was now directed to the creation of magnificent temples.
The pyramid shape was not abandoned, just reduced in size and carved on top of a tall shaft of granite: the obelisk.
These spires of stone represented rays of light.
The pharaohs placed pairs of obelisks at the temple gate in praise of the sun god.
Obelisks of a 100 feet were formed from a single piece of granite, one of the hardest stones to work.