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Excellent Very good But the iconic monuments are still shrouded in a fair amount of mystery. Long says via email.
They were monuments to the fusion of earthly and divine power. If creating an artistically designed, architectural masterpiece out of several hundred tons of stone sounds impossibly challenging, that's because it nearly was. The fact that these original structures were monolithic — meaning they were carved from one single piece of stone — makes them distinct from more modern variations. There are obelisk-shaped masonry structures such as the Washington Monument in Washington, D.
According to experts, obelisks were often associated with the ancient Egyptian sun god, Ra. But their meaning may go even deeper. According to the ancient Egyptian myths of creation ' cosmogonies ' , in the beginning, there was a primordial ocean of nothingness called Nu.
Among these cosmogonies, the Heliopolitan account describes how the first thing to ever arise from these waters was a mound of earth — the so-called Primordial Hill. This mound is clearly inspired by the fertile hills that emerged from the waters of the Nile every year after the annual flood began to recede and the crop-growing season approached. The Benben is actually the icon, the magical representation of the Primordial Hill. The lander is named Philae. The oldest obelisks are almost impossibly old—ancient even by the standards of antiquity.
First conceived in , the Washington Monument took decades to build. It is, by law, the tallest structure in the District of Columbia, and is twice as tall as any other obelisk in the world. Gordon notes that it stands unique among memorials in Washington. Whereas people visit memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson among others to see giant statues of the men they commemorate, the highlight of the Washington Monument is the monument itself.
The statue of Washington inside receives little notice. Robert C. The impetus for eternal remembrance is also reflected in the obelisk's potential for dramatic height. For the citizens of Mecklenburg County, the height of the Independence Monument reached "toward the vault of heaven" and would maintain a "perpetual notice of posterity.
Let it arise until it meet the sun in his coming, let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and parting day linger and play on its summit. The obelisk's origins in the Egyptians worship of the sun are transformed in the Independence Monument as a tower to heaven, reaching its pinnacle towards God in a revised Tower of Babel. Stripped of its pagan beliefs, the obelisk becomes a triumphal structure of America's divine right to freedom and independence.
And the taller the obelisk, the closer to the immortal city in the sky and the greater the power of democratic might. Monument as being located in North Carolina rather than South Carolina, a result of continued border disputes as to where the battle took place in Through partially financing the obelisk and declaring the monument as within state lines, North Carolina reclaimed the memory of the heroic accomplishments of their statesmen. As the tallest and the largest obelisk associated with North Carolina, the U.
Americans debated the merits of monuments given their imperial associations, arguing that this nation was free from the need to commemorate in stone. The scathing text that accompanied the illustration read: "It is this pork-packing self-confidence that has pock-marked this country with hideous statues and monuments and memorials, set up for the eternal laughter of the gods and generations to come. Their unadorned surfaces and abstracted shape brought simplicity and grandeur to an overcrowded commemorative landscape.
The obelisk became a universal monument type, one that reflected an abstracted ideal or individual whose form could transcend the mortal ties to representation. Moreover, the obelisk could symbolize the abstract idea of America.
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