Pyramids in the park

Egyptian iconography can be found throughout our green and pleasant land, from fine gardens and country house landscapes to market squares and public buildings

- Written by Simon Scott

EGYPTIAN iconography is so deep in our national psyche that we no longer give it a second thought when we watch Victoria Coren Mitchell's Only Connect with its ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs: two reeds, lion, twisted flax, horned viper, water, eye of Horus. Nor do we think it unusual that the central escalators in Harrods are in a fabulously kitsch Egyptian style. We also take it for granted that obelisks are the focal points of many towns, cities and landscapes across the UK or that we can stumble across a pyramid in deepest Norfolk or in the Highlands of Scotland.

How did the architecture of a land some 2,000 miles away, whose great pyramids and obelisks were erected around 4,500 years ago, become so widely adopted across the British Isles? At the risk of oversimplifying a complex cultural movement, the answer largely lies in a melting pot of influences from ancient Rome to 18th-century Grand Tourists via Napoleon Bonaparte, with a dash of freemasonry for good measure.

The pyramids are the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to have survived to the present.

When the Romans conquered Egypt they absorbed Egyptian gods into their culture, built their own pyramids in Rome and pillaged ancient artefacts, including obelisks, to decorate the city. The Roman-built Pyramid of Cestius survives and later became a landmark for Grand Tourists, with the cemetery alongside being where both Keats and Shelley are buried.

Rome is also home to the largest collection of Egyptian obelisks on the planet. At least eight obelisks created in antiquity now enhance the Eternal City, including the largest standing ancient Egyptian obelisk in the world in the Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano, with others located in St Peter's Square in the Vatican, the Piazza del Popolo, Piazza della Minerva and elsewhere.