in 1830; nineteen horses were required to raise it into position. The broken piece of the twin was set into the lawn nearby as a romantic ruin. The obelisk was bequeathed to the National Trust along with the house and estate in 1981. The obelisk is a Grade II* listed building. Decipherment of hieroglyphs Discussing the obelisk's role in the decipherment of hieroglyphs, C.W. Ceram characterised the obelisk as "in effect a second Rosetta Stone." Several lithographs of the obelisk and its inscriptions were produced by George Scharf while it was in London. Bankes distributed these lithographs to various contemporaries interested in deciphering hieroglyphs. In his studies of the Rosetta Stone, the scholar Thomas Young had already realised that the cartouches contained the names of the Pharaohs and he had identified the name 'Ptolemy'. In a marginal note on some of the lithographs, Bankes proposed to identify the name 'Cleopatra' in cartouches on this inscription. However, further progress was stymied by the fact that the Greek and Egyptian texts were not close parallels of one another and by Bankes and Young's incorrect belief that Egyptian hieroglyphs were logographic. In France, Jean-François Champollion was also working on the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Based on his earlier work on demotic, he had constructed a hypothetical hieroglyphic text for the name 'Cleopatra'. Jean-Antoine Letronne sent him a copy of the lithograph of the Philae obelisk, which confirmed that his reconstruction was correct and he announced the decipherment of hieroglyphs in the Lettre à M. Dacier in 1822. Bankes, Young, and their circle responded to this announcement with great hostility, claiming that Champollion had not given them proper credit for the discovery. The obelisk was subsequently investigated by Karl Richard Lepsius, who published its text in 1839. Further autopsy was carried out by Ulrich Wilcken in 1887, who reported that the painted Greek inscription was no longer visible by this time. Subsequent publications on the obelisk and its text have all been based on the reports of these nineteenth century observers. Digital research By 2014, the inscriptions had been heavily weathered. The Greek inscription, in particular, was barely visible to the naked eye. In October and November 2014 and spring 2015, 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 (CSAD), undertook RTI scans and 3D imaging of the