School of Hard Knocks: Working the Ancient Quarries of Aswan

Quarries, often ignored, were a crucial part of Egypt. It was from these sites that the precious raw materials and minerals used in the construction of decorative monuments such as sculptures and obelisks was hewn thousands of years ago. Among the most prolific were the Quarries of Aswan, which yielded the red granite of Cleopatra’s Needles and many of the quality stones used in the construction of burial chambers, sarcophagi and columns in the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure at Giza.

A testimony to the site’s importance is the Unfinished Obelisk – a massive monolith partly-carved from the bedrock then abandoned – which still stands there. It’s the largest known obelisk in ancient history.

Surprisingly, major archeological investigations have only taken place in the last 20 years at the Quarries of Aswan, which had become covered-over with rubbish dumps and modern developments. They’ve yielded many important discoveries that reveal much about the importance of the site, the lives of the workers who toiled there and the techniques they used (see the video below for details of underwater excavations at Aswan).

Hard Rock

The Quarries of Aswan lie on the east bank of the Nile south and southeast of the city of Aswan in the South of Egypt, which in ancient times was known as Swenet. It was an important military outpost, as well as an invaluable source of building materials.

The quarries cover an area of 20 square kilometres, and boast a rich variety of typical granites – red, black and grey. It was the granitic rock called Syenite – a coarse-grained mineral similar to granite, but containing little or no quartz – that Aswan was especially renowned for. This was the tough stuff that many an obelisk, temple, tomb and colossus was rendered from. But how did it get from the quarry bed to becoming a famous monument? With a lot of intensive, back-breaking labour, in short.

A Colossal Task

The sheer hubris of the pharaohs ensured that working in a quarry was among the most tedious, painful and grueling jobs in ancient Egypt. The likes of Ramesses the Great, Thutmose III and Hatshepsut demanded obelisks and colossi bigger and grander than any seen before (the latter two rulers were responsible for 10 of the 17 obelisks erected at Karnak alone). Many of them had to be cut from single, monolithic chunks of stone.

The only way to do this was to chisel the monuments out from the quarry by hand, then lift and drag them away. It was a labour-intensive process, made infinitely worse by the fact that Aswan is one of the driest places on earth, and gets rain only every few years on average. The heat must have been exhausting, and in many cases lethal.

The Egyptian labourers worked on their hands and knees, starting on flat surfaces and working their way down into narrow, cramped scalloped trenches, using fist-sized round pounders made from dolerite. A whole hour’s bashing could result in the removal of perhaps just a single handful of dust. For months and months they hammered away, following ocher-colored lines marked out by foremen, judging by markings that have been identified around the site of the Unfinished Obelisk. (Their lives would have been similar to those of the pyramid builders - explored in the heritage key video at the bottom of this article)

The Unfinished Obelisk

Ordered by Queen Hatshepsut to commemorate her 16th anniversary on the throne, the Unfinished Obelisk gives us the best insight of all into what a gargantuan and infuriating task cutting obelisks was for the workers at Aswan. If it had been finished, it would have stood 42 metres high and weighed 1,200 tons – making it a full third larger than any other obelisk in ancient Egypt. It wasn’t completed though, because as the workers dug they found fissures in the granite, and were forced to leave it in situ, still attached at its base to the bedrock.

Quarrymen must have felt a sickening mixture of relief and disappointment when work ceased, knowing that they’d been spared the hardest task of all (cutting underneath) but also that all of their long months of work had been for nothing. As English archaeologist Reginald Engelbach – an expert on the Unfinished Obelisk – put it, “such heartbreaking failures must sometimes have driven the old engineers to the verge of despair before a perfect monument could be presented by the king to his god.”

Depressions left in the quarry face after the removal of other great obelisks have been found nearby – some of which match the dimensions of other such famous monuments, such as the Lateran Obelisk in Rome, which rises 32 metres and weighs 455 tons. Even if the Unfinished Obelisk wasn't seen through to completion, many others were, at an immeasurable cost in time, treasure and human lives.

Transporting the Blocks

Quarrymen seemingly did what they could to make their lives bearable. Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) in his investigations at Aswan uncovered a wall covered with painted and etched scenes. “One featured the god Bes,” he told Al-Ahram, “another a group of ostriches walking in the desert, and there were fishes swimming happily in a lake.”

This may have been graffiti, put up by the workers to decorate their environment – which was otherwise a grim, featureless place. Or they could just as easily have been diagrams used to teach trainee artists.

The workers must have been glad to see the back of their finished carvings, as they were shipped out of Aswan by one of two possible routes. A road, four miles in length, was cut beside the quarries from Syene to Philae – along this route, monuments were perhaps rolled on huge wooden sledges, dragged over lubricated sleepers.

This too was tough, painful work – in an experiment for NOVA using ancient techniques, archaeologist Mark Lehner and 200 men managed to shift a 25 ton block from one of Aswan’s quarries just a few metres in a full day.

Much of the stone was far more likely moved by boat along the Nile. An ancient harbour has been exposed by Dr Hawass and the SCA in their excavations at Aswan. This could be where the granite slabs were loaded onto large ships for transit down the busy river – ancient Egypt’s great highway – towards Memphis and Thebes, and their final pride of place in royal temples and tombs.

Underwater Archaeology at Aswan

More secrets about the Quarries of Aswan might be revealed yet from the base of the River Nile itself. In a recent video interview with Heritage Key – shot by Nico Piazza – Dr Hawass gave an insight into underwater research in the Nile at Aswan. It shows just how much of a hive of activity the area around Aswan was in the ancient period, and how rich it remains in archeological treasure today – divers swim to the bottom and within minutes come up clutching large artefacts such as grain grinders and Coptic niches.

Video: Underwater Archaeology - The Nile at Aswan Featuring Dr Zahi Hawass:

“We can dig in the Nile,” says Hawass, “it’s not enough to dig in the sand.” Who knows what more might be found there as underwater archaeology becomes an increasingly viable method of investigation? A search further upriver to the north may towards Luxor may yet reveal some more of Aswan’s treasures – huge submerged obelisks or statues. “This will be a major discovery,” Hawass adds.

Perhaps they'll be returned to the Quarry of Aswan, which today is an open-air museum protected by the SCA? It would be a fitting honour for the location where many of ancient Egypt’s most iconic monuments were painstakingly carved from the hard face of the earth.

Next: For more big-rock archaeology, watch our video interview with Mark Lehner about his search for information about the pyramid builders: 

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