Unfinished Obelisk Egypt is located in one of the quarries north of Aswan, about 4 km from the train station.
The obelisk, a conical monolithic pillar, was originally erected in pairs at the entrances of ancient Egyptian temples. The Egyptian obelisk was carved from a single piece of stone, usually pink granite from the quarries of Aswan.
It was designed to be wider at its square or rectangular base than at its pyramidal top, which was often covered with a gold and silver alloy.
The four sides of the obelisk shaft are adorned with hieroglyphs that characteristically include religious dedications, usually to the pharaonic gods, and commemorations of the rulers.
While Unfinished Obelisk Egypt is known to have been erected as early as the 4th dynasty (c. 2575-2465 BC), no examples from that time have survived.
The oldest surviving obelisk dates from the reign of Sesostris I (1918-1875 BC) and is located in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo.
The importance of the unfinished obelisk is that it has shown us how the obelisks were made and how the huge hard stones were cut at that time; for example, some diorite stones were found, weighing up to 6 kg, which were used as hammers to separate and cut the sides of the obelisk and the effects of the hammers are visible in the body of the obelisk until now. This phase was to separate the obelisk before starting another process that consists of creating a trench around the obelisk that allows this gigantic mass of pink granite to be released completely. The unfinished obelisk offers unusual theories about ancient Egyptian stone working techniques, with marks of the workers’ tools still clearly visible, as well as ochre-colored lines marking where they were working.
It is believed that work began during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut (1508-1458 BC), possibly to complement what would later become known as the Lateran Obelisk (which originally stood at Karnak and was later taken to the Lateran Palace in Rome).
The unfinished obelisk is almost a third larger than any ancient Egyptian obelisk ever erected.
Had it been finished, it would have measured about 42 meters and weighed nearly 1168 tons, a weight equivalent to about 200 African elephants.
In addition to the unfinished obelisk, an unfinished and partially worked obelisk base was discovered in the Aswan quarries in 2005. Some carvings and rock remains were also discovered that may correspond to the site where most of the famous obelisks were worked.
All these quarries in Aswan and the unfinished objects are open-air museums and are officially protected by the Egyptian government as an archaeological site.
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If its construction were completed, the height of the obelisk would reach approximately 41m, the length of its square base is 4 meters, and its weight upon completion would be approximately 1168 tons.
After the ancient Egyptian workers carved the obelisk on three sides, in preparation for removing it from the ground, they discovered a crack that made it unsuitable, so the workers stopped completing it, and the lower surface of the obelisk is still attached to the rock and is 42 meters long connected to the ground that would have been cut.
Then, this obelisk would be the longest Egyptian obelisk, with a length of more than 41 meters and weighing more than 1,000 tons.
But unfortunately, this obelisk was not completed due to a sudden crack appearing on its surface, so it had to be left unfinished. Had it not been so, it would have been the largest piece of worked stone in the world.
The Unfinished Obelisk is the longest of all known in the ancient world, it is larger than any of the obelisks erected in Egypt. Had it been completed, it would have measured nearly 42 meters and weighed almost 1200 tons. Some archaeologists suggest that Queen Hachespsut intended this obelisk to match the so-called Obelisk-Lateranese, which was originally located in Karnak and is now in Rome.
The creators of the obelisk began to excavate it directly from the granite bed in which it stands to this day. But at some point cracks appeared in the rock, which forced the abandonment of the project; this has allowed archaeologists to learn in great detail about the stoneworking techniques used by the ancient Egyptians.
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