Bargrave's catalogue: Rara, Antiqua, et Numismata Bargraviana (Canterbury Cathedral Lit MS E 16a) When I was at Rome, 1646, this obelisk lay broken in 4 or 5 pieces,
with the fall of it, in the Circle of
the
Emperor Caralla
Emperor Caracalla.[*]It is now called the Circus of Maxentius, or of his son Romulus.
near
St. Sebastian
and
Metella's Tomb, now a
noble antiquity, and called
Capo di Bove.
I took another stone, and with it broke off of the butt end of it this
piece and as much more, and had this polished. The obelisk, as it lay
then and as it is now, is full of Egyptian hyeroglifficks, of which Father Kercherius, that eminent Jesuit, and of my
acquaintance, hath writt a large folio. All the other guglios,[*]The
word is properly not guglio, but guglia. or
obeliscs, at Rome seem to be all of
the same sort of stone, and are stupendious to imagine how they could
possibly be hewn in that bigness and hight out of any rock, though it
may be they might afterward be hewn into that pyramidical proportion and
shape that they now bear. All full of Egyptian hyroglificks, that largest of all before St. Peter at the Vatican excepted, which is one intyre precious
stone -- at least, better than marble, and I think (by my piece) a
jasper; and yet is esteemed to be higher by 3 or 4 foot than the maypole in the Strand at London. Another is dexterously placed
on the Via Flaminia, at the Porto dell Populo, in a poynt to be
seen from 3 of the great streets of Rome. Another dispute is, how it was possible to transport
so vastly weighty things from Egypt
to Rome as one of those stones are,
they having then no such ships as we have now, their byremes and
tryremes being but pittiful boats, yet sufficient to make them masters
of the seas in those times. There are several treatises on this subject;
and the most probable that I find is, that they were brought upon warffs
or raffts of many pines and firs, fastened by art together, and, the
stones being laid upon them, they, with a stearer or 2 or 3 at the end
of those raffts, came terra, terra,
terra (as the Italians
term it) along the coast, or, at least, from promontory to promontory,
until they came to Ostia, and so
10 miles up the Tyber to Rome. Many long and large warfes or
rafts of these fir and pine trees I have found troublesome to our boats
on the Danube, the Rone or Rhodanus, on the Rhine, and Elve, down which rivers an infinite abundance of
that tymber passeth daily thus fastened together, and on some of them
they build 2 or 3 little hutts or cabans and dress their meat. Thus as
to these pyramids' transport.