Before the invention of the clock, sundials were the primary timekeeping device. One of the earliest astronomical instruments for telling time was the shadow-casting component of the sundial, known as the gnomon. The great stone obelisks of Ancient Egypt are the oldest application of the gnomon; set perpendicular, time was recorded by the angular movement and length of its shadow. These monolithic pillars are associated with solar worship and symbolic of the Bennu bird, the mythological Egyptian precursor to the Greek Phoenix. Like the Phoenix, the Bennu bird is linked to duality and represents the cyclical creativity in all beginnings and endings, as well as the essential union of opposites – light and dark, creation and destruction, new and old, solar and lunar, life and death. In its most basic form, the Egyptian obelisk and the gnomon of an equatorial sundial charts the path of the sun by way of shadow. In this sense, the pyramidian-capped objects of Obelisk Series are handheld vessels of illumination amidst the casting of darkness.