If it had been extracted and erected as originally conceived, the Unfinished Obelisk would have stood 137 feet tall and weighed 1,168 tons, dwarfing all others. (The largest survivor, the Lateran obelisk in Rome, rises 105 feet and weighs 455 tons.) However, months or perhaps years into its removal, fissures began to appear in the granite. With each crack, its designers scaled back the size of the obelisk, but each time the quarrymen came upon a new one. When they uncovered a profound fissure near the obelisk's center, the project was abandoned.
"[T]he Aswan Obelisk," wrote the English archaeologist Reginald Engelbach, "enables the visitor to look with different eyes on the finished monuments, and to realize ... the heartbreaking failures which must sometimes have driven the old engineers to the verge of despair before a perfect monument could be presented by the king to his god."
The unfinished obelisk in its quarry at Aswan, 1990
Every great monument has its great chronicler, and the Unfinished Obelisk has Engelbach. Chief Inspector of Egypt's Antiquities Department in the early part of this century, he fell under the obelisk's spell as completely as Carter did with King Tut's tomb. In 1922, the year he had it cleared of the rubble that covered all but 20 yards of its upper shaft, Engelbach published a slim but seminal volume, "The Aswan Obelisk, With Some Remarks on the Ancient Engineering," and a year later, a more popular version. It is to Engelbach that we owe much of our understanding of this extraordinary artifact.

As I stepped through the deep, rock-hewn trenches that define the obelisk, my shoulders brushing the rock on either side, my mind was not on the pharaohs, however, but on their quarrymen. For months and months, in that cramped space under the unrelenting sun, and all for naught, they had bashed out those scalloped trenches with cantaloupe-sized pounders of dolerite. Engelbach estimated that at any one time 130 men each worked a pair of scallops, in a space about four feet square.

Imagine, then, doing this for hours and hours, day in and day out, for months on end—for your life. (Your life must have been brutally short.) Though evidence for slavery in this context is inconclusive, the labor was certainly compulsory. (As Lehner put it: "They didn't have Locke or Hobbes, no concept of individuality or freedom, no unions. It's hard to think it was fun.") If there was a silver lining to the abandonment of the Unfinished Obelisk, I thought, it was that the workers were spared having to pound it out underneath, which must have been the most back-breaking work of all. But then again, perhaps they felt cheated after all that effort.
As we left the quarry in the late afternoon yesterday, the low-angled sun burning the cliffs amber, the phrase "galling beyond words" kept floating around in my head. It comes from a line of Engelbach's: "It must have been galling beyond words to the Egyptians to abandon it after all the time and trouble they had expended, but today we are grateful for their failure, as it teaches us more about their methods than any other monument in Egypt."
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