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Egypt became part of the Roman Empire in 30 BC, and after the death of the Emperor Theodosius I in AD 395, became part of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire. Although not graced with the quantity of Egyptian material that ended up in Rome, the Eastern Empire’s capital Constantinople (now Istanbul) has a number of material links with the land of the Nile.
The Thutmose III obelisk
The most obvious is the great obelisk that stands in what is today Sultanahmet Square. This was originally Constantinople’s Hippodrome (an arena for chariot races), built under Constantine I as part of the re-foundation of the city of Byzantium as the capital of the Roman Empire during the first half of the 4th century AD. The spina – the ‘central reservation’ of the racetrack – was first adorned by Constantine with the bronze Serpent Column, brought from Delphi in Greece. Later, Theodosius I (AD 379-395) added two obelisks – one newly built from separate porphyry blocks, and a monolithic granite one – which were erected in AD 390. (In the 10th century, Constantine VII built a third obelisk by stacking cut stones on top of each other, leading to it being called the Masonry or Walled Obelisk.)
The Egyptian obelisk had originally been set up by Thutmose III as one of a pair in front of the Seventh Pylon at Karnak, and it is also depicted on the king’s nearby Hall of Annals. It seems to have been the western of the two – the base and stump of the shaft of its eastern companion still being present at Karnak, as are various fragments of obelisk-shaft. Some of these pieces may have been part of the Constantinople obelisk (known now as the Obelisk of Theodosius), as only the top two-thirds of the monument now exist, cut off square, presumably to remove a broken/damaged lower segment. Its original height has been estimated at between 28 and 35 metres.
It is unclear exactly when the obelisk was removed from Karnak, but it certainly lay on the beach at Alexandria under Emperor Constantius II (AD 337-361), who had a ship built to transport it to Constantinople. One clue is that another of Thutmose III’s Karnak obelisks (the Single Obelisk of Ra-Horakhty, actually erected by Thutmose IV) had been removed from the temple to Alexandria by Constantius’ father Constantine I, and taken to Rome by Constantius II (where it is now outside the church of St John Lateran). It therefore seems likely that both obelisks were taken down by Constantine and transported to Alexandria, but not moved to Europe until later.
The Constantinople obelisk was placed on a new pedestal, with dedicatory inscriptions in Latin and Greek, and reliefs including various scenes of the Emperor, his court and activities, and also the erection of the obelisk. A depiction of a chariot race shows the two obelisks on the spina. A bronze pine-cone was installed on the apex of the Thutmose III obelisk, which fell off during an earthquake in 869. Since then, the monument has remained essentially unchanged, although the lower half of its base became progressively encumbered by the rising surrounding ground level. It was first excavated in 1856 by the British archaeologist Charles Newton, who was shortly to discover the site of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. The texts of the obelisk had been first published a decade earlier by Samuel Birch of the British Museum, with full facsimiles of its texts and decoration issued by the Prussian Egyptologist Richard Lepsius in 1849.
The Porphyry Obelisk
Egypt was the source, too, of the raw material for the ‘new’ obelisk – and many other things as well. This was porphyry, the purple ‘imperial’ stone, quarried at Mons Porphyrites, some 50 kilometres inland from Hurghada in the Eastern Desert. Never used by the pharaonic Egyptians, the stone was exploited by the Romans from the early 1st century to the first part of the 5th century AD. Apart from the obelisk, porphyry was employed for making statuary, architectural elements such as columns, and the sarcophagi of the first emperors to be buried at Constantinople. It is likely that at least the basic shaping of items was carried out on-site in Egypt, to minimise transport weight.
The original location of the Porphyry Obelisk is uncertain, although a fragment of limestone base that may have belonged to it was found close to the Laleli Mosque, and seems to have come from the Capitolium in the city Forum. Of the actual obelisk, only two pieces have come to light. One, a slice through the upper part of the shaft and pyramidion, was used, along with slices taken from porphyry columns, to adorn the exterior of Yerevan Kiosk. This was built by the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV, soon after 1635, in the Topkapı Palace complex.
The other piece, part of the shaft, was found in a dump of porphyry monumental fragments in the second court of the Palace in 1846. First displayed outside the former church of St Irene, which General Ahmed Fethi Pasha had transformed into a museum, the obelisk was moved in 1916 to the garden of the new Archaeological Museum (founded in 1891) in the Topkapı grounds.
The porphyry sarcophagi
The Palace garden also housed five porphyry sarcophagi, which had originally contained the remains of emperors. They were thus not only made from an Egyptian stone, but comprised the sepulchres of nominal successors of the pharaohs – although the last emperor to use a cartouche was Maximinus Daza, who reigned AD 310-313, prior to the establishment of Constantinople as the imperial capital. Two of their lids ended up so deeply buried that they ultimately had to be extracted from the roots of a tree. A further porphyry sarcophagus-coffer found its way to the Nuruosmaniye Mosque, 500 metres north-west of the Hippodrome, where it was employed from the 18th century as a rainwater tank. Another coffer was found soon after the First World War, just north-east of the Topkapı Palace.
Apart from the two buried lids, the Topkapı sarcophagi were moved to St Irene in 1847, and in 1916 three of them were installed outside the Archaeological Museum. At this point, the ‘missing’ lids were extracted and reunited with their coffers, alongside another lidless porphyry coffer, discovered in 1910 in the centre of Constantinople. The latter coffer was found 500 metres south of the site of the former Church of the Holy Apostles, which was founded by Constantine I, the first Christian Roman emperor, in 330, and completed by his son Constantius II. Constantine I then became the first of a long series of emperors to be buried there. Initially, his porphyry sarcophagus was surrounded by 12 empty sarcophagi representing the 12 apostles (Constantine holding himself to be the 13th apostle), but was transferred to a new circular, domed mausoleum nearby during 356/357.
The original Church of the Holy Apostles was demolished by the Emperor Justinian in the early 530s and a new building dedicated in 540. Its new mausoleum followed the same form as the original, now placed east of the church. An additional mausoleum was constructed for Justinian himself at the end of the northern arm of the church, the complex remaining the imperial burial place until the death of Constantine VIII in 1028. The last of the emperors buried there to rule Egypt was Constans II, interred in 668 in Justinian’s annexe, apparently in the same sarcophagus as his ephemeral father Constantine II. After 1028, emperors were interred in various churches and monasteries around the city, the largest single number being in the church of St Saviour Pantokrator (now the Zeyrek Mosque). The Church of the Holy Apostles was demolished in the 15th century to make way for the Fatih Mosque.
There is no clarity as to which of the surviving sarcophagi belonged to which emperor, other than that it is known from literary sources that nine emperors had porphyry examples, beginning with Constantine I and ending with Marcian, who died in 457. However, one example, of unusual curved form and lacking any Christian cross, has been attributed to Julian the Apostate. Another one is interesting in that its cross is actually the crux ansata, derived from the ancient Egyptian ankh-sign.
Istanbul is a fascinating city, with monuments of Islam layered over those of Christianity, and some intriguing links to Egypt – a country that was for many centuries ruled from there, first as part of the Roman Empire, and later as part of that of the Ottomans.
Aidan Dodson is honorary Professor of Egyptology at the University of Bristol. He studied Egyptology at the Universities of Durham, Liverpool, and Cambridge, is a Fellow of the Society of the Antiquaries of London, a former Chairman of the Egypt Exploration Society, and Simpson Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo.
All images: the author, unless otherwise stated
