The Ancient Standard

Sailing Obelisks Down the Nile (ca. 3000 – 300 BC)

By: The Scribe on October, 2007

Ever wonder how the Egyptians managed to build their large monuments, let alone get them where they needed to be? After all, even if the shapes of statues were carved out once the stone was in place, the stone needed to get to its destination somehow – and there weren’t simply giant limestone stores in the city, either. People had to quarry the stone that to be used, and then transport it to the site where the temple or monument was being built – sometimes hundreds of miles away.

The standing suspicion was that the Egyptians moved their massive stone artifacts from one place to another via waterways – there are plenty of paintings and carvings from Egyptian tombs that show people using large boats and barges to move things like statues and obelisks, and it is not hard to see that both the Luxor Temple and the pyramids at Giza have ancient canals that lead up to their “front door”, as it were.

The only problem was, nearly all the known obelisks from ancient Egypt came from a granite quarry in Aswan – and until now, there was no known canal route to get them from the quarry all the way up the Nile to other cities, except by dragging the monument across the ground on a land journey. That clearly would not have been an ideal situation for these artifacts, considering that some of the larger obelisks can weight upwards of 50 tons. One of the unfinished obelisks in the Aswan quarry is estimated at over 1,100 tons – and was abandoned by the ancient workers only because of the appearance of latent cracks, and not because of its weight.

However, recent discoveries have revealed that there may have been a canal in Aswan after all, hidden from historians for centuries by modern roadwork. This canal would have made transporting obelisks a nearly effortless endeavor, as compared to moving them by land: the canal linked the Aswan quarry with the Nile, which meant that the obelisks could have been moved from the quarry to the Nile, and then sailed down the Nile to their final destination.

The only downside to this method was that the timing had to be perfect – in ancient Egypt, the Nile flooded several times annually, and it was the floodwater that would have filled up the quarry’s canal. So, in order to take advantage of the floodwaters and actually use the canal, workers would have needed to finish their obelisks on time, move the monuments onto rafts and into the canal at a point below the floodwater levels, and wait for the water to come – then the monuments could easily float once the flood came.

As a side-note, the archaeologists who found the Aswan quarry also discovered graffiti drawings left behind by quarry workers thousands of years ago, as well as grid markings that would have helped with measurements for the obelisks. Some of the graffiti includes images of ostriches and dolphins, but as water levels rise in the area, Egyptologists fear that the graffiti will be lost or washed away forever.

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Tomorrow: What the Hellespont are ‘the Dardanelles’?