Unfinished Obelisk: Ancient Egyptian Stoneworking at Aswan

Site at a Glance

Rating

★4.3

Popularity

Medium

Country

Egypt

Primary era

Bronze Age

External website

Open ↗

Eras represented

Bronze Age, Classical

Civilizations

Egyptian, Roman

Site type

Civic

Remains

Obelisk

History

The Unfinished Obelisk is an abandoned ancient Egyptian monument in Egypt, situated in the granite quarries at Aswan. Its precise production date is unknown, although carving may have begun under Queen Hatshepsut, an Eighteenth-Dynasty ruler who governed as king and commissioned major building projects. It may have been intended for the temple of Karnak, the great temple complex at ancient Thebes dedicated chiefly to the god Amun.

An Eighteenth-Dynasty Commission

Thutmose III, the Eighteenth-Dynasty pharaoh who followed Hatshepsut, is also associated with the monument. An inscription states that in the twenty-fifth year of his reign he ordered two obelisks for Karnak. The precise connection between that commission and the unfinished monolith remains uncertain, so the obelisk cannot be assigned securely to either ruler.

Workers cut the stone on three sides while preparing to separate it from the granite bedrock. Cracks in the stone made the block unsuitable for completion, and the attempt to extract it was abandoned. Later efforts to divide or recover part of the monument may belong to the reign of Thutmose III. Wedge-shaped depressions on its surface indicate further, unsuccessful attempts to split the stone during the Roman period.

Rediscovery and Protection

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, visitors apparently saw only about twenty metres of the monolith. After King Fouad expressed a wish for it to be fully exposed during a visit to Aswan, clearance work was carried out under Reginald Engelbach, curator of the Cairo Museum. Completed in the early twentieth century, the work showed that the sides had already been cleared, while the obelisk itself remained in its trench and had never been removed from the bedrock.

The monument and the surrounding Aswan quarries preserve evidence of ancient Egyptian stone extraction and working methods. The quarry district extended for about six kilometres along the Nile, and granite from the area was transported northward by river. The site is now an open-air museum and archaeological area under Egyptian government protection. In 1979, the quarries and the obelisk were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae, a designation recognizing cultural and natural places considered to have outstanding international importance.

Remains

The Monolith and Quarry Trench

The Unfinished Obelisk is a long block of red or rose granite, also called Aswan granite or syenite, a hard granite-like igneous stone. It lies in a large trench roughly one kilometre from the Nile, in an area described as about two kilometres south of ancient Syene, the settlement now known as Aswan. The block has a square section, narrows toward its upper end, and was intended to finish in a pyramid-shaped point.

If completed, the obelisk would have been approximately 41.75 metres long or high, with a square base measuring about 4.20 by 4.20 metres. Its estimated weight would have been about 1,168 tonnes, commonly rounded to approximately 1,200 tonnes. It was cut on three faces but never polished, inscribed, or detached from the underlying rock. The underside extends for about 42 metres and remains joined to the bedrock.

Large lateral trenches, approximately sixty centimetres wide, run around the exposed sides. Rounded expansions within them could have served as positions from which stonecutters worked. The surviving surfaces carry percussion marks, broad rounded grooves, ochre-coloured working lines, and unsuccessful wedge holes. The wedge-shaped depressions grouped in one area are associated with Roman-period efforts to split the stone.

Quarrying and Transport Features

The working marks reflect the use of dolerite, an especially tough stone suitable for percussion tools. Ancient workers appear to have struck the granite repeatedly with dolerite hammers or naturally rounded dolerite balls, rather than using the later Roman practice of cutting slots and inserting wooden wedges swollen with water or metal wedges. The tools commonly weighed about five kilograms and measured approximately fifteen to thirty centimetres across. Numerous worn examples were found near the quarries.

The quarrying process began with the selection of a relatively uniform rock bed free of fissures. Workers levelled its surface with hot bricks that were abruptly cooled with water, then repeatedly pounded the granite with dolerite tools. This produced the broad, rounded channels visible on the stone. Experimental work indicated that the method could remove about twelve cubic centimetres of granite per minute. At an eight-hour working day and 300 working days per year, one worker could remove approximately 1.8 cubic metres annually. With an estimated workforce of 130 people, the existing trenches could have been made in slightly less than a year.

The monument is nearly one-third larger than any ancient Egyptian obelisk known to have been erected and is generally described as the largest known ancient obelisk. Its incomplete condition preserves the stages of extraction more clearly than a finished monument would. Aswan granite was also used for sarcophagus chambers, casing, false doors, interior passage walls, pillars, columns, and door constructions, as well as for pyramids, statues, and royal colossi.

An approximately 1,000-metre canal once linked the quarries with the Nile. Completed obelisks were probably polished before being dragged to the river, loaded onto barges, and floated during the Nile flood. The quarry area also contains debris from five other obelisks worked from Aswan granite. A partly worked obelisk base discovered in 2005, together with rock carvings and traces connected with additional obelisk production, extends the physical evidence for the activities carried out across the quarry.