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.