Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan: How Egyptians Quarried Obelisks

The Unfinished Obelisk is a giant granite obelisk still lying in an ancient quarry at Aswan in southern Egypt, abandoned after it cracked during cutting. About 42 metres long, it would have been the largest obelisk the Egyptians ever made. It is usually dated to the New Kingdom, around 1470 BC, and because it was never finished it shows, better than any other monument, how the Egyptians quarried these huge single stones.

Obelisks and Aswan granite

Obelisks were tall, four-sided stone pillars tapering to a pyramid-shaped tip, often capped with gold or electrum to catch the first rays of the sun. They were linked with the sun god and usually set up in pairs at temple entrances. The kings of the 18th Dynasty raised many of them at Thebes, especially at Karnak.

The best stone for obelisks was the red granite of Aswan, at the First Cataract of the Nile. The quarries there supplied granite for statues, shrines and sarcophagi for some 3,000 years, and the stone could be floated downstream on barges during the annual flood.

The quarry and the obelisk

The Unfinished Obelisk lies in the northern quarries on the edge of modern Aswan. Its top surface and sides were largely shaped, but it was never separated from the bedrock beneath. If completed, it would have weighed an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 tonnes and stood around 42 metres high.

Its sheer size shows how ambitious the project was. Moving a stone of that weight would have required a very large workforce hauling on ropes and an exceptionally large barge, and its planners clearly believed this could be done.

That would have made it about a third taller than the tallest obelisk the Egyptians actually erected. The Lateran obelisk, now in Rome, is about 32 metres tall, and Hatshepsut’s standing obelisk at Karnak about 29 metres.

Who ordered it and why it failed

There is no inscription on the obelisk, so its date and patron are uncertain. It is often attributed to Hatshepsut, who quarried several giant obelisks at Aswan and had their transport shown in her temple at Deir el-Bahari. Other scholars suggest a different New Kingdom king. Either way it belongs to the great age of obelisk building in the 15th and 14th centuries BC.

During the work, cracks opened in the granite. An obelisk had to be cut as one perfect block, because a flaw could break it during lifting. The workers appear to have tried to save the stone by planning a smaller obelisk, but further cracks made this impossible too, and the project was abandoned.

What it reveals about ancient methods

The obelisk was studied in detail by the British engineer and Egyptologist Reginald Engelbach, who cleared the site and published his findings in 1922. His work showed the steps of the process.

First the surface was levelled and the shape marked out. Workers then pounded the granite with balls of dolerite, a stone harder than granite, weighing several kilograms each. Working shoulder to shoulder in narrow trenches around the obelisk, they slowly crushed the rock to dust. Marks in red ochre on the trench walls seem to record measurements and the progress of work.

The next stage, never reached here, was to undercut the obelisk and free it from the bedrock. It would then have been levered out, dragged on a sledge to the river and loaded onto a huge barge. Reliefs at Deir el-Bahari show a pair of obelisks travelling on such a barge, towed by many smaller boats.

How the Egyptians finally raised obelisks upright is still debated. Common theories involve earth ramps and a sand-filled pit into which the obelisk was gradually lowered onto its base. Modern experiments have raised smaller obelisks with simple tools, showing that the methods were possible with ropes, levers and organised labour.

The site today

The quarry is now an open-air museum. Visitors can walk around the trenches and see the dolerite pounding marks, ochre lines and the cracks that ended the project. Other quarry faces nearby carry traces of later cutting with wedges, a technique more common in later periods.

Many finished obelisks from Egypt now stand far from Aswan, in Rome, Istanbul, Paris, London and New York, among them the two Cleopatra’s Needles. The Unfinished Obelisk shows the effort that lay behind all of them.

Timeline

• c. 1479–1458 BC: Hatshepsut’s reign, when giant obelisks were quarried at Aswan.
• c. 1470 BC: Likely period of work on the Unfinished Obelisk, which cracks and is abandoned.
• 4th century AD: The Lateran obelisk is moved from Karnak to Rome.
• 1922: Reginald Engelbach publishes his study of the Aswan obelisk.

Why it matters

Finished obelisks reveal little about how they were made. The Unfinished Obelisk, frozen mid-way, shows the tools, measurements and sheer labour involved in Egypt’s most ambitious stone projects. It also reminds us of the risk: a single crack could waste months of work by hundreds of people.