Aswan's pink and red granite built obelisks, colossi and sarcophagi the length of Egypt, and this quarry is where you see how. Lying in a trench, still attached to the bedrock along one side, is a single enormous obelisk that would have stood around 42 metres tall and weighed over a thousand tonnes, far larger than any that was ever raised, had a crack not opened along its length partway through the work and forced the masons to abandon it where it lay. What makes the site fascinating is precisely that it was left unfinished: you can walk alongside it and read the process directly from the stone, the channels pounded out by hand with balls of harder dolerite, the trial grooves, the tool marks, even the scale lines. It turns an abstract question, how did they cut and move these things, into something you can stand right over. It is a compact, exposed, open-air site of half an hour or so.
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