The Dahesh Museum, at Madison Avenue and 56th Street, has extended the run of its outstanding exhibition “Napoleon on the Nile” to April 22. Napoleon’s Egyptian venture was militarily disastrous. But the “savants” he sent along with his soldiers helped lay the foundation of modern Egyptology. Part of the Napoleonic booty was the Luxor obelisk (though it didn’t go up in the Place de la Concorde in Paris until the time of Louis Philippe).

Egyptian obelisks have been swiped for centuries: They are rare and precious things. Only 22 remain in the world. Egypt still possesses five and Rome has 13. The Romans originally looted the obelisks, but the 16th-century Pope Sixtus V directed their present locations in the Eternal City. Istanbul, London, Paris, and New York each have one obelisk.

The obelisk behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Central Park, is the only ancient Egyptian obelisk in the Americas. How many people are aware of how immensely more important it is than the Met’s Temple of Dendur? At least most New Yorkers have stopped calling the obelisk “Cleopatra’s Needle,” in a silly attempt to “sex it up” by association with the actress Claudette Colbert.

Cleopatra had nothing to do with it. It was commissioned by the pharaoh Thutmose — the third Thutmose, to be exact. The obelisk is roughly three-and-a-half millennia old. For its first millennium and a half, it stood in Heliopolis. In the year 12 before the common era, it made its way to Alexandria, but not until Cleopatra was gone. In 1869, the khedive of Egypt (who was not Egyptian but Turkish) gave the obelisk to America in commemoration of the opening of the Suez Canal. Napoleon reportedly admired this obelisk, but his orientalists thought it was too deteriorated and steered him to the Luxor obelisk that he brought back to Paris.

Getting the 69-foot, 200-ton granite obelisk to New York from Egypt wasn’t easy. It wasn’t until 1881 that the monument was placed on its hill in the Park. Our obelisk is roughly the same size and of the same period as the one on the Victoria Embankment in London, also an 1869 gift of the khedive. The obelisk in Rome’s Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano is also from Thutmose’s dynasty, but is much larger than New York’s. Ours is slightly smaller, but a couple of centuries older, than the Paris obelisk.

Pope Sixtus V knew what to do with obelisks. Who can imagine Rome without the obelisks in St. Peter’s Square or the Piazza del Popolo? Yet no one imagines New York with its obelisk. An obelisk is a magnificent place-making form, yet ours makes no place, defines no space, but stands, rather forlornly, in an amorphous part of the park.

Anyone who visits the splendid “Napoleon on the Nile” owes himself a trip to the ancient obelisk in Central Park.

fmorrone@nysun.com