Stone quarries of ancient Egypt

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Rock temples cut directly in the rocks at the Silsileh quarrying site, near Aswan Silsileh.jpg
Rock temples cut directly in the rocks at the Silsileh quarrying site, near Aswan

The stone quarries of ancient Egypt once produced quality stone for the construction of decorative monuments such as sculptures and obelisks. These quarries are now recognised archaeological sites. Eighty percent of the ancient quarry sites are in the Nile valley; some of them have disappeared under the waters of Lake Nasser and some others were lost due to modern mining activity.

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Some of the sites are well identified and the chemical composition of their stones is also well known, allowing the geographical origin of most of the monuments to be traced using petrographic techniques, including neutron activation analysis.

In June 2006, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) of Egypt established a new department for conservation of ancient quarries and mines in Egypt. The new department was designed to work in close cooperation with the regional SCA offices, and special training programmes for Inspectors of Antiquities will be carried out to enable the regional authorities to tackle inventory, documentation, risk assessment and management of the ancient quarries and mines.

This article details some of the most important ancient quarry sites in Egypt.

The quarries of Aswan

The quarries of Aswan are located along the Nile in the city of Aswan. There are a number of well-known sites: Shellal, consisting of northern and southern quarries within an area of about 20 km2 (7.7 sq mi) on the west bank, and the islands of Elephantine and Seheil. One of the known directors of the Aswan sites was Hori during the reign of Ramses III. In the present days, the quarry area is to become an open-air museum. [1]

Typical materials known from this site are:

Some of the monuments known to come from this site are:

Gebel el Ahmar

Gebel el Ahmar [4] is located near Cairo on the east bank of the Nile, near the suburb of Heliopolis. The name means Red Mountain. The site was in full production in the times of Amenhophis III, Akhenaton, Tutankhamon, and Ramses III. The quarry was directed by Huy, known as "Chief of the King's Works", and also by Hori.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Some of the monuments known to come from this site are:

Silsileh

Gebel el-Silsila or Gebel Silsileh is 64 km (40 mi) north of Aswan along the banks of the Nile. It was a very well known quarrying area throughout all of ancient Egypt due to the quality of the building stone quarried there. The site is a rich archaeological area, with temples cut directly in the hills. Examples include the rock temple of Horemheb on the west bank. Many of the monuments here bear inscriptions of Hatshepsut, Amenhotep II, Ramesses II, Merenptah, and Ramesses III. The quarries and the stone temples here are visible from boats on the Nile.

Some of the monuments known to come from this site are:

Edfu

These quarries are located 8 km (5.0 mi) north of Edfu.

Some of the monuments known to come from this site are:

Wadi Hammamat

Doryphoros torso (Uffizi). Basanite from the Wadi Hammamat quarry Doryphoros Torso.jpg
Doryphoros torso (Uffizi). Basanite from the Wadi Hammamat quarry

Wadi Hammamat is a quarrying area located in the Eastern Desert of Egypt. This site is noted because it is described in the first ancient topographic map known, the Turin Papyrus Map, describing a quarrying expedition prepared for Ramesses IV.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Widan el-Faras

Widan el-Faras is located on Gebel el-Qatrani, Faiyum, 60 km (37 mi) southwest of Cairo in the Western Desert. The quarry landscape of the Northern Faiyum Desert comprise both the Umm es-Sawan and Widan el-Faras basalt quarries, both exploited in the early third millennium BC. [7]

Typical materials known from this site are:

Muqattam hills

The Muqattam hills are a site located near Memphis.

Typical materials known from this site are:

El Amarna

The El Amarna site is located a short distance from El Amarna.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Idahet

The site is located a few kilometres from Idahet, in barren desert terrain. It was abandoned during the Middle Kingdom.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Gabal Abu Dukhan

The Gabal Abu Dukhan site, near modern Hurghada on Egypt's Red Sea coast, was particularly important for the Roman Empire. Pliny the Elder's Natural History stated that "imperial porphyry" was discovered at an isolated site in Egypt in 18 CE by a Roman legionary named Caius Cominius Leugas. The location of the site, known to the Romans as Mons Porphyrites, was lost for many centuries until rediscovered in the 19th century. It is the only source of imperial porphyry in the world.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Some of the monuments known to come from this site are:

Koptos

Koptos is located in Wadi Rohanu.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Qurna

Qurna is located near Thebes. It was an active site during the reign of Amenhotep III.

Typical materials known from this site are:

Other sites

Other important quarry sites include:

Related Research Articles

Aswan City in Egypt

Aswan is a city in the south of Egypt, and is the capital of the Aswan Governorate.

An obelisk is a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape or pyramidion at the top. Originally they were called tekhenu by their builders, the Ancient Egyptians. The Greeks who saw them used the Greek term obeliskos to describe them, and this word passed into Latin and ultimately English. Ancient obelisks are monolithic; that is, they consist of a single stone. Most modern obelisks are made of several stones.

Karnak Ancient Egyptian temple complex

The Karnak Temple Complex, commonly known as Karnak, comprises a vast mix of decayed temples, chapels, pylons, and other buildings near Luxor, in Egypt. Construction at the complex began during the reign of Senusret I in the Middle Kingdom and continued into the Ptolemaic period, although most of the extant buildings date from the New Kingdom. The area around Karnak was the ancient Egyptian Ipet-isut and the main place of worship of the Eighteenth Dynasty Theban Triad with the god Amun as its head. It is part of the monumental city of Thebes. The Karnak complex gives its name to the nearby, and partly surrounded, modern village of El-Karnak, 2.5 kilometres north of Luxor.

Index of Egypt-related articles Wikipedia index

Articles related to Egypt include:

Seti I Egyptian pharaoh

Menmaatre Seti I was a pharaoh of the New Kingdom Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt, the son of Ramesses I and Sitre, and the father of Ramesses II. As with all dates in Ancient Egypt, the actual dates of his reign are unclear, and various historians claim different dates, with 1294 BC to 1279 BC and 1290 BC to 1279 BC being the most commonly used by scholars today.

Ramesseum Memorial temple of Ramesses II, Luxor, Egypt

The Ramesseum is the memorial temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II. It is located in the Theban Necropolis in Upper Egypt, on the west of the River Nile, across from the modern city of Luxor. The name – or at least its French form Rhamesséion – was coined by Jean-François Champollion, who visited the ruins of the site in 1829 and first identified the hieroglyphs making up Ramesses's names and titles on the walls. It was originally called the House of millions of years of Usermaatra-setepenra that unites with Thebes-the-city in the domain of Amon.Usermaatra-setepenra was the prenomen of Ramesses II.

Colossi of Memnon Two Ancient Egyptian statues near Luxor

The Colossi of Memnon are two massive stone statues of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, who reigned in Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. Since 1350 BCE, they have stood in the Theban Necropolis, located west of the River Nile from the modern city of Luxor.

Ramesses IV The third pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt

Heqamaatre Ramesses IV was the third pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty of the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. His name prior to assuming the crown was Amonhirkhopshef. He was the fifth son of Ramesses III and was appointed to the position of crown prince by the twenty-second year of his father's reign when all four of his elder brothers predeceased him. His promotion to crown prince:

is suggested by his appearance in a scene of the festival of Min at the Ramesses III temple at Karnak, which may have been completed by Year 22 [of his father's reign].

Arabian-Nubian Shield

The Arabian-Nubian Shield (ANS) is an exposure of Precambrian crystalline rocks on the flanks of the Red Sea. The crystalline rocks are mostly Neoproterozoic in age. Geographically - and from north to south - the ANS includes parts of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Somalia. The ANS in the north is exposed as part of the Sahara Desert and Arabian Desert, and in the south in the Ethiopian Highlands, Asir province of Arabia and Yemen Highlands.

Gebel el-Silsila Place in Aswan Governorate, Egypt

Gebel el-Silsila or Gebel Silsileh is 65 km north of Aswan in Upper Egypt, where the cliffs on both sides close to the narrowest point along the length of the entire Nile. The location is between Edfu in the north towards Lower Egypt and Kom Ombo in the south towards Upper Egypt. The name Kheny means "The Place of Rowing". It was used as a major quarry site on both sides of the Nile from at least the 18th Dynasty to Greco-Roman times. Silsila is famous for its New Kingdom stelai and cenotaphs.

Unfinished obelisk Ancient obelisk

The unfinished obelisk is the largest known ancient obelisk and is located in the northern region of the stone quarries of ancient Egypt in Aswan, Egypt.

Lake Moeris Lake in Egypt

Lake Moeris is an ancient lake in the northwest of the Faiyum Oasis, 80 km (50 mi) southwest of Cairo, Egypt. In prehistory, it was a freshwater lake, with an area estimated to vary between 1,270 km² (490 mi²) and 1,700 km² (656 mi²).

Pi-Ramesses Capital of the ancient Egyptian 19th dynasty

Pi-Ramesses was the new capital built by the Nineteenth Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II at Qantir, near the old site of Avaris. The city had served as a summer palace under Seti I, and may have been founded by Ramesses I while he served under Horemheb.

Akoris, Egypt Place in Minya, Egypt

Akoris ; Egyptian: Mer-nefer(et), Per-Imen-mat-khent(j), or Dehenet is the Greek name for the modern Egyptian village of Ṭihnā al-Ǧabal, located about 12 km north of Al Minya. The ancient site is situated in the southeast of the modern village.

Wildlife of Egypt The flora and fauna of this country in northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia

The wildlife of Egypt is composed of the flora and fauna of this country in northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia, and is substantial and varied. Apart from the fertile Nile Valley, which bisects the country from south to north, the majority of Egypt's landscape is desert, with a few scattered oases. It has long coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea, the Gulf of Suez, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. Each geographic region has a diversity of plants and animals each adapted to its own particular habitat.

Faiyum Oasis

The Faiyum Oasis is a depression or basin in the desert immediately to the west of the Nile south of Cairo in Egypt. The extent of the basin area is estimated at between 1,270 km2 (490 mi2) and 1700 km2 (656 mi2). The basin floor comprises fields watered by a channel of the Nile, the Bahr Yussef, as it drains into a desert hollow to the west of the Nile Valley. The Bahr Yussef veers west through a narrow neck of land north of Ihnasya, between the archaeological sites of El Lahun and Gurob near Hawara; it then branches out, providing rich agricultural land in the Faiyum basin, draining into the large saltwater Lake Moeris. The lake was freshwater in prehistory but is today a saltwater lake. It is a source for tilapia and other fish for the local area.

Wadi es-Sebua

Wadi es-Sebua, or Valley of the Lions, is the site of two New Kingdom Egyptian temples, including one speos temple constructed by the 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II, in Lower Nubia.

The Rosemarie and Dietrich Klemm Collection, deposited in the British Museum in London, consists of thousands of rock samples from the sites of Egyptian quarries. The collection was formed by the Egyptologist Rosemarie Klemm and the geologist Dietrich D. Klemm, both at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Comparison with these rock samples can make it possible to identify, certainly or with probability, the origin of the stone used in ancient Egyptian architecture, statues and inscriptions.

Flaminio Obelisk

The Flaminio Obelisk is one of the thirteen ancient obelisks in Rome, Italy. It is located in the Piazza del Popolo.

Cleopatras Needle, London

Cleopatra's Needle in London is one of three similarly named Egyptian obelisks and is located in the City of Westminster, on the Victoria Embankment near the Golden Jubilee Bridges. It is close to the Embankment underground station. It was presented to the United Kingdom in 1819 by the ruler of Egypt and Sudan Muhammad Ali, in commemoration of the victories of Lord Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and Sir Ralph Abercromby at the Battle of Alexandria in 1801. Although the British government welcomed the gesture, it declined to fund the expense of transporting it to London. The obelisk is inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphs.

References

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  2. "Aerial Photograph". Building the Great Pyramid.
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  4. "El Gebel el Ahmar, Egypt". SatelliteViews.net.
  5. 1 2 Heizer, R. F.; et al. (21 December 1973). "The Colossi of Memnon Revisited". Science. 182 (4118): 1219–25. doi:10.1126/science.182.4118.1219. PMID   17811309.
  6. "Doryphoros torso | Artworks | Uffizi Galleries". www.uffizi.it. Retrieved 2021-05-08.
  7. "Fieldwork in the Northern Faiyum desert". QuarryScapes: Conservation of ancient stone quarry landscapes in eastern Mediterranean.