Obelisk, Aswan - Picture of the Week for 9 November 2011

The 1200 ton Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan, Egypt

Having briefly obsessed about pylons last month it seems logical to move on to the obelisk (…look up your Egyptology..!) My Picture for this week shows the Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan. This massive slab of southern Egypt's finest granite lies still embedded in the quarry where it was created.  If the stonemasons had been able to finish it, this obelisk would have stood over 40 metres high and weighed almost 1200 tons. This would have made it the largest obelisk ever created by Ancient Egyptian technology. [The Washington monument at 169 metres tall claims to be the world’s largest obelisk, but that isn’t either ancient or monolithic; it was constructed from many pieces of stone in the nineteenth century.]

Ancient obelisks were created not just by carving, but also by trapping water inside drilled holes in the granite and allowing expansion caused by the sun’s heat or by lighting fires over the holes to then crack the stone. In the case of the Unfinished Obelisk, cracks appeared in the wrong places, the great obelisk was fatally flawed. As a result there is nothing to give us an indication of when it was carved or under which Pharaoh. There is an assumption that it was intended for the temple complex at Luxor.

Even had their stonemasons successfully completed their task, the Egyptians might have never been






 able to move the giant obelisk to Luxor. Most were transported down the Nile, probably slung beneath wide barges when the flood waters were at their height. Even with the river water bearing some of the weight, the sheer scale of the Unfinished Obelisk may have meant the waters would never be deep enough.
What was an obelisk for, in the Ancient Egyptian’s understanding?  They were vital religious artifacts, pointed at the top, as a symbol of the sun’s rays, or even antennae to catch the rays and bring them into the temples outside which the obelisks, in pairs, stood. They were not mere public monuments until the Romans began to steal them and erect them as single monoliths to the glory of Rome rather than  to the sun god, Ra.