JAMES GRASBY : Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.

Today to celebrate the BBC TV series, Hidden Treasures of the

National Trust, we're sharing a classic story from our podcast

125 treasures presented by Alison Steadman.

In this episode, we travel to the Gardens Of Kingston Lacy in

Dorset to discover a 30 ft tall ancient Egyptian antiquity. The

Philae Obelisk. A closer look at this artefact reveals a curious

inscription which helped Egyptologists to unlock a

mystery which had remained unsolved for millennia.

ALISON STEADMAN: We're in Dorset on the south coast of England

looking out to sea. If we turn around and begin walking inland,

we pass through farms and expanses of crops until

eventually the terrain changes. And we reach formal gardens and

the striking site of a lavish family home. This is Kingston

Lacy, whose land stretches right down to the Dorset coast.

There's a wild garden, a Japanese garden and a cedar walk

planted with seeds that Kingston Lacy's intrepid former owner

collected whilst in the holy land. Indeed, this former owner

traveled far and wide during his time and his travels even helped

to unlock the secrets of an ancient civilization. I'm Alison

Steadman and this is 125 Treasures, a podcast from the

National Trust. Episode three, The Needle On the Lawn.

CATHERINE SHARP: I'm standing in the park to the north of

Kingston Lacy house. I am surrounded by green pasture,

trees dotted around me.

ALISON STEADMAN: This is Catherine Sharp, Cultural

Heritage curator at the National Trust. She looks after Kingston

Lacy.

CATHERINE SHARP: And turning to the house as stately homes go.

It's quite a, a small house, but it certainly has a presence in

this landscape. Rising from each corner are tall chimneys and

projecting from the entrance is a port cochere or a covered

entrance porch.

And entering the house now, coming into the magnificent

entrance hall, inside it had to make a big impact and this hall

certainly does. It has a marble floor and a great arch in front

of you directly opposite the front door with steps.

ALISON STEADMAN: Much of what we see in the house today. From the

marble staircase to the extensive collection of Spanish

paintings is thanks to Kingston Lacy's former owner, William

John Bankes.

Born in 1786 William was an explorer, architect and

socialite, moving in circles that included famous poets,

artists, and even the Prime Minister. He was an avid

collector, but his most impressive artifacts were

acquired in an attempt to understand an ancient society

that captivated him.

CATHERINE SHARP: And now entering the servants' hall.

It's now set up as the exhibition room for the Egyptian

collection accumulated by William John Bankes.

It's making use of alcoves in the room as display cases and

there are some really amazing things in here. I think probably

what strikes me most of all are the graven tablets. They were

made by workmen who were working on the tombs in the valley of

the kings.

ALISON STEADMAN: This is the largest private display of

Egyptian relics in the UK.

CATHERINE SHARP: William John Bankes' most famous artefact

from his travels in Egypt isn't in this exhibition room with the

others.

I'm climbing the stairs to the library and the library has a

very different feel. I think you can tell it has a plush carpet,

what a difference from the marble floors. And it's here

from the library window that I can see the jewel of William

John Banks' Egyptian collection. It's outside and it's very large

and it stands at the end of a long path on the south lawn.

I'm going to walk down the path towards it.

It's a very tall piece of stone. It's made of pink granite and

it's like a pillar tapering towards the top with a square

section and it stands on some stone steps and it just reaches

up into the sky.

ALISON STEADMAN: Standing at 9m in height, this is the Philae

Obelisk.

You may have seen other famous obelisks, Cleopatra's Needle in

London, for example, or the Washington Monument in America.

But unlike those, the Philae Obelisk held the key to

unraveling a mystery that had perplexed society and scholars

for hundreds of years.

And it all starts in 1813, when Bankes decide to take an

eight-year gap year traveling through Europe and the Middle

East. In 1815, he then went to Egypt. Anne Seba wrote a

biography of William John Banks.

When he went to Upper Egypt and Palmyra and Syria, he went in

small bursts and then would come back. And of course, he had a

classical education. He was very well educated, he spoke Greek.

CATHERINE SHARP: Egypt had been ruled by the Greeks for many

centuries. And so Greek, as well as the hieroglyphics that they

couldn't yet understand was a language that could inform his

studies in Egypt.

ALISON STEADMAN: Egypt had been changing fast.

CATHERINE SHARP: Napoleon had invaded Egypt. Ultimately, his

campaign in Egypt did not succeed. But what had happened

was that information about Egypt was disseminating throughout

Europe and it was becoming a very exciting place to be. So

for William John, a young British man with a lot of money,

it was like entering Aladdin's cave. And at the same time, you

see, this was a period when scholars were trying to decipher

the ancient texts.

ANNE SEBBA: The rosetta stone had just been brought back to

England as well. And the rosetta stone was something that really

excited Victorians as to how they would decipher what was on

the rosetta stone. And there was a race really between the French

who were being led by a scholar called Champollion and the

British who are being led by a scholar called Thomas Young.

ALISON STEADMAN: No one understood if hieroglyphic

script recorded a language or whether it was just a series of

picture symbols which were used instead of words, it was a

locked language for which no one could find the key.

The rosetta stone contained the same text in multiple languages

including hieroglyphics. So was commonly seen as the best chance

of creating a method of translation. It was one of a

number of objects which had been taken out of Egypt and sent to

Europe for study. But William John Bankes was initially

content with the sketches and drawings of artefacts. He came

across.

ANNE SEBBA: At one point when he was inside a temple at Abu

Simbel, instead of tearing down some of the tablets on the

walls, he worked painstakingly in great heat copying. So he

wasn't the sort of collector who was in a hurry who just wanted

to tear everything down and, and send it home to England.

CATHERINE SHARP: I think what distinguishes William John is

the fact that he was so passionate. He was intent on

copying everything he saw. He was a good, good draftsman and

watercolourist. And even though he couldn't understand

everything he saw, he faithfully copied it. And this is so

important because a lot of what he saw on his trip in the early

19th Century has since been lost.

ALISON STEADMAN: Banks, wanted to see everything and copy it

down. His incredible energy amazed the people he was with.

He never stopped and he scarcely slept. For his trip in Egypt, he

had kitted out a grand barge.

ANNE SEBBA: They went up the Nile and that really was where

Bankes discovered all sorts of intriguing objects.

CATHERINE SHARP: The Nile is the main artery of Egypt, but on the

Nile are a number of cataracts which like waterfalls and then

stretches of river. In one of these stretches is the Isle Of

Philae. On this island was the Temple of Isis.

ALISON STEADMAN: This was a very impressive collection of ruins,

but it was what had once flanked the entrance to the Temple of

Isis that intrigued Bankes the most.

ANNE SEBBA: He discovered an obelisk at Philae that had

submerged into the water. It dates from the 14th Century BC.

CATHERINE SHARP: It was a very important temple. It was a very

beautiful and large temple. And when William Bankes and his

party arrived on the island they spent several days there

sketching, of course, sketching and drawing. William John saw

the list and instantly wanted it. He he knew it was important.

ALISON STEADMAN: A series of inscriptions on the obelisk

immediately caught Bankes' Eye.

ANNE SEBBA: This really is what Bankes' reputation depended on,

this obelisk, because it had hieroglyphs. And at the base, it

had Greek language.

CATHERINE SHARP: The shaft is adorned with hieroglyphics on

the base. There is an inscription in ancient Greek.

Now, William John could read ancient Greek, but he couldn't

read hieroglyphics. In fact, nobody could.

ALISON STEADMAN: From the drawings that Banks did. Whilst

on the island of Philae, he was able to make a startling

discovery.

CATHERINE SHARP: One of the things that he was able to

recognise in the hieroglyphics was a name in a cartouche which

he saw was Cleopatra. And another name came up which was

Ptolemy. A cartouche is like a sort of surrounding border.

And in hieroglyphics, royal names are surrounded by borders.

It's, it is like giving them a capital letter. He was able to

recognize that even though he couldn't decipher what he was

reading, he was able to guess that that's what he saw.

ALISON STEADMAN: He knew it was an important find.

CATHERINE SHARP: Which I think is why he was very keen to get

his drawing of the obelisk to London circulating to his friend

Young, who was working hard on inscriptions at that time. And I

think it also made him very conscious of the need to be

accurate. He was disorganized, he was a bit slapdash in this

respect. He was absolutely conscientious. He got the thing

right.

ALISON STEADMAN: And now he was faced with the huge task of how

to get this enormous object back to Dorset.

ANNE SEBBA: Bankes was the sort of man who responded to a

challenge. Here was a challenge. He knew that it would be

extraordinary in Kingston Lacy in the grounds of Dorset to have

an ancient Egyptian obelisk.

ALISON STEADMAN: At this time, as part of the governor of

Egypt's drive to give its art culture and ancient wonders more

prominence outside the Ottoman Empire, Bankes was supported in

his quest to transport the obelisk back to his home in

England. But this was not a quest he could take on alone.

ANNE SEBBA: One of the people that Bankes had with him was a

former circus strongman, Giovanni Belzoni. And Belzoni

was actually an engineer. When Bankes couldn't stay, he asked

Belzoni to stay on and try and work out how to bring the

obelisk back to England.

CATHERINE SHARP: They had to roll it onto a boat. If you

imagine it's on an island, there's a body of water. It's

got to go onto a boat and they constructed a kind of wooden

pier, but it wasn't strong enough. And the obelisk fell

into the Nile.

ANNE SEBBA: They lifted it and had to watch it plunge back into

the waters.

ALISON STEADMAN: The sheer weight of the massive granite

slab smashes its wooden rollers and amid much panic and shouting

the precious cargo slides under the water. You can just picture

Belzoni face watching this priceless remnant from history

sinking into the Nile, the future of the obelisk and the

invaluable detail of its inscription now hung in the

balance.

Belzoni and his men got to work to secure the obelisk and try

against all odds to rescue it from the Nile. With gargantuan

effort they hauled the obelisk out of the water.

ANNE SEBBA: Eventually Belzoni was able to get it onto another

barge.

CATHERINE SHARP: And it finally arrived in Deptford. In 1821

ANNE SEBBA: Sixteen horses were employed over a period of four

days to bring it back to Kingston Lacy.

CATHERINE SHARP: It was a very awkward piece of stone to move.

But William John was determined.

ANNE SEBBA: You know, it was a major undertaking. So that's one

of the reasons why, why Bankes became so well known in England.

ALISON STEADMAN: Another reason was he's recognizing the names

of Ptolemy and Cleopatra that would turn out to be vital in

the cracking of the hieroglyphic code.

CATHERINE SHARP: His transcription of what was on the

obelisk, in spite of the fact, he didn't understand what he was

drawing was as accurate as it could possibly be. And his work

was used by leading scholars of the day to help them to decipher

the ancient texts.

ALISON STEADMAN: After receiving copies in 1822 of Bankes' and

Thomas Young's work on the Philae Obelisk, the French

scholar Jean-Francois Champollion made a breakthrough.

ANNE SEBBA: Everybody thought at that point, if you can work out

what the picture represents, you'll get there. But

Champollion won the race because he understood that the

hieroglyphs actually were used to create a sound.

ALISON STEADMAN: He dashed into his brother's office,

exclaiming "je tiens l'affaire, I've got it!" before promptly

collapsing and taking to his bed for five days.

CATHERINE SHARP: He obviously had used Bankes' texts as well

because the scholars weren't the travellers, they weren't the

explorers.

ALISON STEADMAN: Armed with the context of what had now been

learned from the obelisk among other artefacts, Champollion was

able to decipher the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra on the

rosetta stone and working from the stone began to translate

hieroglyphics in earnest.

This helped provide even more information about the obelisk

itself and its full inscription could now be read.

CATHERINE SHARP: The hieroglyphics, pointing up into

the sky quite appropriately, represent a homage to the

Egyptian royal family. Whereas the ancient Greek at the base

recounts the fact that by their great benevolence, the king

absolved the priests at the temple of Isis from which this

came on the island of Philae from having to pay tax because

it was crippling them.

And they wanted to show in Greek which was the language of

authority at the time that they didn't have to pay tax.

ALISON STEADMAN: Champollion's discovery opened up a new world,

unlocking secrets of Ancient Egypt that had remained a

mystery for centuries. Champollion talked up his own

discoveries. He became famous and he and the rosetta stone had

their names etched into posterity. He pointedly refused

to acknowledge the significance of Bankes' vital work.

Bankes and the Philae Obelisk remain unsung heroes in the

story of the cracking of the hieroglyphic code.

But back home in England Bankes did become everybody's favorite

dinner guest.

ANNE SEBBA: He was in demand as a an explorer, as a storyteller,

as a very entertaining man about town.

ALISON STEADMAN: Bankes' attention turned away from Egypt

and exploration.

ANNE SEBBA: Once he inherited the house in 1834 his interest

really changed to architecture. And to Kingston Lacy.

CATHERINE SHARP: He employed an architect called Charles Barry,

well known for the Houses Of Parliament who by 1835 had

become very famous. Although William had first met him in

Egypt before he was ever an architect. It was a box in which

William John could put his treasures.

And there were many. And quite apart from the Egyptian ones,

there were all the things he collected on his travels in

Spain and Italy, many many paintings, Spanish paintings and

the decoration of the house absolutely minutely orchestrated

by William John.

ALISON STEADMAN: But Banks would not be allowed to enjoy growing

old in his magnificent creation. He was gay and lived in a time

when homosexual acts were illegal. This would tear his

life apart.

ANNE SEBBA: I think Bankes' homosexuality doesn't really

come to the fore until he's charged with indecent exposure

in 1833.

CATHERINE SHARP: Luckily he had friends who helped him get off

the charges.

ALISON STEADMAN: But eight years later, at the age of 55 he was

caught again.

ANNE SEBBA: And this time he was caught in flagrante in Green

Park with another soldier and he was arrested immediately. And

this time, he was charged with the much more serious indecent

assault, a crime for which men were hanged.

ALISON STEADMAN: And this time, he couldn't rely on friends in

high places to get him off the charges.

CATHERINE SHARP: He would have been made an outlaw. Outlaws

could have all their properties seized by the government. He

didn't want that to happen. So in 1841 he signed all his

property over to his younger brother and fled into exile in

Venice.

By doing that he managed to ensure that the Kingston Lacy

lands, all his lands remained in the family and were not seized.

But what a tragedy for a man who'd put so much of his heart

into his house, into his collections.

ANNE SEBBA: The house was unfinished at this point in

1841. He'd had six years, but he hadn't finished what he planned

to do. Create this Italian Palazzo with the obelisk taking

pride of place on the lawns,

ALISON STEADMAN: His steward had continued to keep him abreast of

the developments his siblings were making of the house,

William Bankes was an absolute and total control freak.

ANNE SEBBA: And there are some intriguing insights where he

asks his sister if she could try out whether a pot would go here

or a piece of sculpture there.

ALISON STEADMAN: It seems Bankes couldn't let go of his

unfinished project. His pride and joy, Kingston Lacy.

CATHERINE SHARP: His body was in Venice, but his heart was always

in Dorset.

ALISON STEADMAN: Bankes had been dealt a double blow. His

scholarly breakthrough sidelined then his beloved home and

collections effectively taken away, but he may now be getting

the recognition he deserves.

CATHERINE SHARP: Very interesting recent research by

Oxford University using the very latest technology has been able

to examine the inscriptions on the Philae Obelisk. They've

managed to digitize it so that they can tell where the

inscription has degraded because the obelisk has always been

outside. It's never been protected by anything against

the weather. So the inscriptions in places have become very worn.

ALISON STEADMAN: With the equipment, the team were able to

clarify both inscriptions, the hieroglyphs and the Greek

inscription underneath casting new light on how impressive

Banke's original work had been.

CATHERINE SHARP: And they have been able to tell by doing that

how accurate William John's drawings of the inscriptions

were. It just shows how, how very meticulous he was.

ALISON STEADMAN: It's devastating to think of all the

time and effort, passion and travel Bankes put into his

collection, particularly his treasured obelisk for him never

to see any of it again. However, if local legend and a clue in a

letter are to be believed, William may have found a way to

continue to enjoy his masterpiece.

CATHERINE SHARP: There are stories that he did return to

Kingston Lacy.

ALISON STEADMAN: There's a letter which suggests that

Bankes may once have made a secret visit to Kingston Lacy

one last time before he died.

ANNE SEBBA: There wasn't quite enough marble in one of these

niches so that there's this very poignant letter to the steward

where he tells him how to cut the marble very finely, which

part of the marble to use. And he says, take it from the box I

showed you.

So there is an indication that he came and quite clear that

there had been some practical demonstration of, of what was

needed. So I, I do believe that once Bankes knew that probably

he wasn't in good health towards the end of his life. So it might

have been 1853 1854, he probably risked coming home for a short

time.

CATHERINE SHARP: He might well have sailed back to the shores

of Dorset, landed on his own land off Purbeck and made his

way to Kingston Lacy just to see what his house looked like after

all the years of imagining what it must look like.

ALISON STEADMAN: I really do hope Bankes had a chance to

return and I hope he gazed up one last time at the Philae

Obelisk.

CATHERINE SHARP: And what do I think when I look at it? Well,

I'm standing at it at its base. The house Kingston Lacy looks

curiously small and this looks very big and very important. And

of course, it was because this artifact was collected at an

extremely important and pivotal time for the translation of

ancient scripts.

And I think this symbolizes in a way how important that period of

discovery was in the early 19th Century and what a significant

part William John himself played in it.

JAMES GRASBY : Thanks for listening to this episode of the

National Trust Podcast. To find out more about the historical

interpretation of the Philae Obelisk and other artefacts in

the collection at Kingston Lacy, follow the links to resources in

our episode show notes.

If you've enjoyed it and would like to hear about how we make

the National Trust Podcast, I'll be appearing at the Chalke

History Festival in June along with the producers behind the

show. We'll be back soon with another episode. But for now

from me, James Grasby, goodbye.