Egypt
Heritage Key (Malcolm Jack)
- Hawass Dig Days - Obelisks
Al Ahram Weekly Obelisks were signs of victory, and the inscriptions carved on them record the titles and achievements of the Pharaohs. The tip of an obelisk, called the capstone or pyramidion, was cased with gold, its brilliant shine connecting it with...
- Canal Linking Ancient Egypt Quarry To Nile Found
National Geographic (Steven Stanek) Experts have discovered a canal at an Aswan rock quarry that they believe was used to help float some of ancient Egypt's largest stone monuments to the Nile River. It has long been suspected that ancient workers...
- Egyptian Team To Search Nile For Sunken Remains
Egypt Daily Star News For the first time, the Nile River will be the subject of an archeological excavation. An Egyptian archeological team affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities will track down the locations of the river’s ancient sunken...
- Travel: Nile Cruise
Adelaide Now (Jessica Hurt) Aswan was originally known as Swenet, a frontier town of ancient Egypt. Its quarries were celebrated for their stone, especially the granitic rock called syenite. Their stone was used in the colossal statues, obelisks and shrines...
- Travel Notes
Nile Cruise and Philae http://www.bruneitimes.com.bn/details.php?shape_ID=32668 "Although the dams are of great value for cultivation, their construction meant the flooding of priceless historical monuments. One such monument was saved the Philae temple,...
Egypt
Feature: Working the quarries of Aswan
Heritage Key (Malcolm Jack)
Quarries, often ignored, were a crucial part of Egypt. It was from these sites that the precious raw materials and minerals used in the construction of decorative monuments such as sculptures and obelisks was hewn thousands of years ago. Among the most prolific were the Quarries of Aswan, which yielded the red granite of Cleopatra’s Needles and many of the quality stones used in the construction of burial chambers, sarcophagi and columns in the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure at Giza.
A testimony to the site’s importance is the Unfinished Obelisk – a massive monolith partly-carved from the bedrock then abandoned – which still stands there. It’s the largest known obelisk in ancient history.
Surprisingly, major archeological investigations have only taken place in the last 20 years at the Quarries of Aswan, which had become covered-over with rubbish dumps and modern developments. They’ve yielded many important discoveries that reveal much about the importance of the site, the lives of the workers who toiled there and the techniques they used (see the video below for details of underwater excavations at Aswan).
- Hawass Dig Days - Obelisks
Al Ahram Weekly Obelisks were signs of victory, and the inscriptions carved on them record the titles and achievements of the Pharaohs. The tip of an obelisk, called the capstone or pyramidion, was cased with gold, its brilliant shine connecting it with...
- Canal Linking Ancient Egypt Quarry To Nile Found
National Geographic (Steven Stanek) Experts have discovered a canal at an Aswan rock quarry that they believe was used to help float some of ancient Egypt's largest stone monuments to the Nile River. It has long been suspected that ancient workers...
- Egyptian Team To Search Nile For Sunken Remains
Egypt Daily Star News For the first time, the Nile River will be the subject of an archeological excavation. An Egyptian archeological team affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities will track down the locations of the river’s ancient sunken...
- Travel: Nile Cruise
Adelaide Now (Jessica Hurt) Aswan was originally known as Swenet, a frontier town of ancient Egypt. Its quarries were celebrated for their stone, especially the granitic rock called syenite. Their stone was used in the colossal statues, obelisks and shrines...
- Travel Notes
Nile Cruise and Philae http://www.bruneitimes.com.bn/details.php?shape_ID=32668 "Although the dams are of great value for cultivation, their construction meant the flooding of priceless historical monuments. One such monument was saved the Philae temple,...