The Unfinished Obelisk (Aswan)
written by weechonghooi
on March 3rd, 2009
(1 vote)
Upon my arrival in Aswan after a one night train journey all the way from Cairo city, the first thing we visited was the Unfinished Obelisk. Now, does anyone here understand what I am talking about? I hope you do.
It is much of the red granite used for ancient temple, or simply a pillar in an informal way I guess. The ancient quarries which furnished Egypt with this stone, and yes. it still can be seen in the modern city of Aswan today. This is where the Unfinished Obelisk is to be found. It was supposed to be a 42 meters high and would have weighed around 1,150tons, just one stone. Yes, one piece. And not just as easy as that, but one piece that would need to be detached from a big granite.
This one we are looking at is one of the uncompleted project way back long long time ago. And I could really say that thank god they have one failure project like this, or modern people like us wouldn’t have ant idea how exactly the obelisk was made of.
As you can see it had cracked in several places and was never detached from the main rock yet. The notches seen in the photos were made in the granite to extract the blocks. So, how do you think about the engineering in ancient time in Egypt? Under hot sun with no heavy duty construction vehicles, and they still did such an unbelievable buildings. Amazing!
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