Cleopatra’s Needle

FIGURE 11.19 The state of the carving on Cleopatra s Needle has deteriorated as a result of the action of acid rain tat after 3500 years in the Egyptian desert (b) after a further 00 years in Central Park, New York City. 

The Egyptian and Tigris-Euphrates Valley societies both symbolized the Philosophers Stone as an elongated pyramidal or conical shaped stone, about twice as tall as it is wide. It was similar to the Ben Stone and the point of Thutmose Ill s column, now the misnamed Cleopatra s Needle in London. 

Like the Hellenistic list makers, we are still subsuming the cultural landscapes of others into our world, but now through the power of tourism. Taj Mahal and the Great Wall become part of our own cultural landscape, in the same way that archaeological museum displays have captured others landscapes the Elgin marbles and Cleopatra s Needle were located into the cultural landscape of London, not the Mediterranean (having been previously disassociated from their original locations by the Ottoman Empire). The landscape role of features such as these derives from the individual personal experiences of tourists, rather than from external political actors. 

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