Unfinished Obelisk

Introduction

The Unfinished Obelisk was never brought here. It is a piece of granite that never left the quarry. It lies in a trench in the northern quarry of Aswan, still attached to the bedrock on three sides, with only the top surface cut to an obelisk profile. It is generally attributed to Queen Hatshepsut, about 1473-1458 BCE, and was intended for the temple of Amun at Karnak. Had it been finished it would have been about 42 metres long and roughly 1,200 tonnes (the official figure is 1,168), the largest obelisk ever raised in pharaonic Egypt. It stopped here because the stone itself failed: a horizontal crack and several fine fissures appeared in the upper third during cutting, and the masons judged it unsafe to move, so they abandoned it in place. That failure is exactly what makes it valuable today. Almost every surviving obelisk is only a finished product; this is the one place where the intermediate steps are visible. One circuit of it reads out the whole method. The masons pounded away at the sides with dolerite hammer-balls, chipping channels into the granite; at the base of the deep trench are lateral wedge slots where wooden wedges were driven in, swelling as they soaked and splitting the stone along a planned line. A small case at the entrance holds several of the original hammer-balls, each a few kilos; picking one up is the only way to grasp how many thousands of hours this represents. Smaller unfinished and part-finished obelisks stand nearby, showing how the quarry divided its labour between medium and colossal projects. The site is tiny and one loop covers it, so the real question is not whether it is impressive but whether you take a guide. With someone to point out the trench, the wedge slots and the crack, half an hour becomes a lesson in ancient Egyptian engineering; without one, most visitors see a large stone lying at an angle. The quarry is almost entirely unshaded and Aswan regularly passes 40 degrees from May to September, so go early or late. The best arrangement is a half day linking the High Dam, the Unfinished Obelisk and Philae Temple: from an ancient quarry to a modern dam to a temple rescued from the water, three stages of the same relationship between people and the Nile.

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