In July 1880, just eleven years after the opening of the Suez Canal, a 3,500-year-old, 220-ton obelisk, one of a pair built for Pharoah Thutmose (r. 1479–1425 B.C.), floated up the Hudson River on a barge to 96th Street. This was presumably a gift from the Khedive of Egypt, intended to promote trade with the United States. It took 112 days for the monument to be borne across town and down Fifth Avenue to 82nd Street, to the Graywacke Knoll in Central Park, where it was put in place on January 22, 1881. This was the last of three obelisks from Egypt to adorn the leading cities of modern empires: two years earlier, its twin had been placed near the Thames, and in 1836 the French received one from Luxor, which they erected in the Place de la Concorde. In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama sees the voyage of the London obelisk as an event joining the Nile and the Thames in a “bloodstream” of myth and memory. But Central Park is surely a much different setting from the Thames. In this paper I re-examine how this obelisk affected the physical, cultural, political, and historical landscapes of New York and America, as well as of Alexandria, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire as a whole. To properly contextualize this “spolium” (though it was not actually taken in an act of war, there was some gunboat diplomacy involved) and its place in its new environment, the Egyptomania that gripped many Americans (supplanting the fascination with Classical Greece and Rome a few decades earlier) must be considered. Moreover, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886, was apparently based on another colossal monument, modeled on a female Egyptian peasant but never realized, that the sculptor intended as a lighthouse to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal. Various threads thus connect the landscapes of New York and Ottoman Egypt in this era. In contemporary descriptions of the obelisk’s arrival in New York (e.g., The New York Times and the account of Henry Gorringe, who escorted the monument to the city), the Ottomans and Egyptians themselves are rarely mentioned. Given this absence, itself a form of commentary, it is worthwhile to regard the New York obelisk in light of the Ottoman antiquities law (Asar-i Atika Nizamnamesi), enacted in 1869, which also established the Imperial Museum.