The Philaeobelisk is one of twin obelisks discovered in 1815 at Philae in Upper Egypt. It was discovered nearly intact, while its twin had broken into pieces in antiquity. Both were soon afterwards obtained by William John Bankes, an acquisition which included an important bilingual inscription. He noted two inscriptions on it, one in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the other in ancient Greek. According to C.W. Ceram, "This obelisk...was in effect a second Rosetta Stone. The names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were framed in a cartouche, and when Jean-François Champollion placed them one above the other, he noticed equivalent signs, "which put Champollion on the road leading to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics. The inscriptions record a petition by the Egyptian priests at Philae and the favourable response by Ptolemy VIII Euergetes and queens Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III. The obelisk has been dated to approximately 118 or 117 BC. During the 1820s, Bankes acquired the obelisk and a single, large broken piece of its twin found at Philae and had them transported to his estate at Kingston Lacy in Dorset, England. The operation was carried out by the adventurer Giovanni Belzoni. The obelisk was set up as a central feature of the gardens; nearby the broken piece of the twin was set into the lawn as a romantic ruin. The house and estate were bequeathed to the National Trust and the obelisk is located in the gardens. The obelisk is a Grade II* listed building. In October and November 2014, Ben Altshuler of the Institute for Digital Archaeology, in association with Alan Bowman and Charles Crowther of Oxford's Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, made RTI scans of the obelisk. They observed significant, previously illegible Egyptian and Greek inscriptions. The obelisk, in keeping with its bilingual nature and the "translation" metaphor of the Rosettaspace mission, gives its name to the mission Philae robotic lander, which arrived at the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 6 August 2014 and landed on 12 November 2014.
