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In 1585, Pope Sixtus V decided to make an urban and architectural move that had been under consideration for over a century. He would shift the Egyptian obelisk near the Vatican in Rome 83m from the side of the Basilica of St Peter to directly in front.

It was a project of the utmost symbolic power. While taming  a heathen icon and creating a centre piece to an axially planned and richly ornamented Rome (which continued  under Sixtus), it would prove Renaissance engineering skill matched that of the Romans  and the Egyptians before them.

Many architects will sympathise with what happened next. Sixtus convened a ‘congregazione’, basically  a client committee, made up  of cardinals, the heads of the local government, magistrates,  a treasurer-general (the 16th-century version of quantity surveyors) and a tax collector. Then they put out a call or entries to ‘men of letters, mathematicians, architects, engineers and other valiant men’ to enter a competition to decide who would undertake the work.

Over 500 people from all  over Italy entered, flooding  Rome with working models, drawings and treatises about how the task could be achieved. Then, the pope gave the job  to an old friend.

Forty-two-year-old Domenico Fontana had been responsible for building a palace for Sixtus when he was a cardinal, and seemed to be in the box seat for the job the whole time. But it was an inspired choice. Not only did he achieve the feat with the use of only 907 men and 75 horses (compared to 8,362 men used by the Egyptians to move and erect an obelisk in 1150BC, not including the 900 who died in the process), but thereafter became a kind of expert subcontractor, raising further  fallen obelisks in Rome, and even installing one for the Medici family in Florence.

The Circus Maximus in Rome, with its two Egyptian obelisks

This book, by four historians, tells this story and many more  in compelling detail from the 4,500-year history of obelisk raising. They take the narrative from Old Kingdom Egypt, to Rome, then Paris, London and New York, tracing the symbolic power of these Egyptian monuments that endured and transformed through the centuries. The book is very readable, and at its best has  the effect of making the reader understand these mysterious columns as fundamental architectural objects, created often as memorials, but symbolising power and majesty through their form, inscription, and the awe-inspiring technology of their making.

The authors begin with  an account of how Egyptian workmen would literally bash the obelisks out of the bedrock using harder, hand-held rocks, and then transport them on vast obelisk ships to their intended sites. They cover the inconclusive debate about how the Egyptians erected them, given their lack of iron pullies and winches. Later, we travel to Augustan Rome, where engineers had to work out how to move them across the Mediterranean. The Romans used obelisks to symbolise how a great power (Egypt) had been brought under the sway of the empire, and also incorporated their symbolic, religious meaning, integrating the gods Isis and Osiris into their pantheon. All but the Vatican obelisk eventually fell, but many were resurrected by Sixtus and later popes, sanctified and capped with crosses.

Later, Western powers found obelisks just the things for their pretensions. The Luxor Obelisk  in Place de la Concorde in Paris was erected in 1833 by engineer Jean-Baptiste Lebas. The authors compellingly describe this as a kind of sanitising  urban move, placing an ancient and politically neutral (but impressive) object in the square where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had lost their heads. It was transformed into an object of cold scientific enquiry, the decoration around its base focused on the engineering methods Lebas used to move it.

By 1878, the arrival of Cleopatra’s Needle in London roused little political interest and, like its cousin in New York’s Central Park, seems to have been integrated into the consumer economy through advertising and media, rather than playing a symbolic role. This was the end (for now?) of journeying obelisks, and these days arguments are more about repatriation of heritage than the symbolic power of the stones.

While this book is not at its best when trying to be analytical, its meticulous storytelling shows us the symbolic power of architecture in the starkest way possible. It is the story of moving the Vatican obelisk that feels like the centre piece of this fascinating history – when ritual, technology, history, politics and urbanism met in one, very large piece of Aswan granite from a quarry in the south of Egypt.