Is the diagram of the Egyptian trinity a copy of a pictogram on an obelisk?
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No, its not. In fact, that appears to be nonsense. However, its interesting 17th century nonsense.
The obelisk in question, I'm not sure where the original is, but there's a copy to this day standing at a fountain in the Piazza Navona in Rome. As for the original...
The obelisk, made of Aswan granite, has an interesting history. It is connected with the emperor Domitian, and was originally thought to have come from the Serapeum, which the emperor rebuilt in A.D. 80. However, it is equally plausible that the obelisk might have originated from the Temple of the Gens Flavia on the Quirinal Hill, built by Domitian dedicated to his family cult. The hieroglyphic inscriptions on the obelisk were of Roman authorship, offering a hymn to Domitian, and the deified emperors Vespasian and Titus, possibly on the occasion of something being restored.
It was moved in the 4th Century, after which both its original location and the knowledge of how to read the hieroglyphic carved upon it were lost. However, it still looked really cool, and the lost language on it added a healthy dollop of mystique. In the early 1600's Pope Innocent X decided to have it moved again, to the plaza in front of his family home, with a suitable setting, of course, and commissioned a Jesuit scholar named Athanasius Kircher to oversee the effort.
As I said, the knowledge of translating hieroglyphics was lost at that time, and not really regained for another 200 years. Kircher didn't let that stop him though, and attempted his own translation anyway. To be fair to him, someone eventually had to be the person to figure it out, so why not him?
Well ... it wasn't him. Boyohboy was it not him. In particular, that diagram of his linked in the question appears to be Kircher's own attempt to illustrate his translation off the (now) south face of the obelisk, which he translated (into Latin like you see on that diagram) as:
'To the triform Divinity Hemptha - first Mind, motor of all things, second Mind, craftsman, pantamorphic Spirit - Triune Divinity, eternal, having no beginning or end, Origin of the secondary Gods, which, diffused out of the Monad as from a certain apex into the breadth of the mundane pyramid, ...
It goes on in this poetic vein for quite a while, but you can see where his diagram of the pyramid with the trinity flows from this translation. The picture itself appears to be from a book he wrote about his work in 1650, Obeliscus Pamphilius (Pamphilji was the pope's family name).
So when the hieroglyphs were actually deciphered two centuries later, thanks to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, what did they say? "Horus, strong bull, beloved of Maat."
Oh well. Not all theories are winners, right?
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