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Rambo at the camel staging area along the Nile.
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By Camel to a Lost Obelisk
by Peter Tyson
March 18, 1999
Once a pharaoh's builders had quarried an obelisk, the next
step—an atrociously labor-intensive one—was to get
it from the quarry to the Nile, where they would load it on a
barge for shipping to Thebes or elsewhere. As daunting as it
would have been to haul away the
Unfinished Obelisk,
at least its movers wouldn't have had to go too far: The Nile
lies only a few hundred yards from the granite quarry. And it
would have been all downhill, along a series of road-like
embankments the Egyptians built expressly for the purpose.
But what if you were pharaoh and you wanted your obelisk
fashioned out of the handsome red quartzite found in the Gebel
Simaan quarry west of Aswan? Gebel Simaan lies far out in the
desert, on a plateau several miles west of the Nile. How could
your workers possibly convey such a gargantuan stone that far?
To investigate this question, I traveled yesterday to the
quarry, where another unfinished obelisk—this one the
work of Seti I (1318-1304 B.C.)—lies abandoned in the
sand.
The only way to get to Gebel Simaan is by camel, so that's
what I took.
First I hired a boat to take me across the river to a camel
staging area on the west bank. There, several dozen saddled
dromedaries, the one-humped camels of Africa, stood or sat
gawkily in the hot sand, blinking away flies wallowing in the
viscous fluid of their enormous eyeballs. My camel driver was
a Nubian named Mohammed. (Nubians are the people of southern
Egypt and northern Sudan.) With a gesture from Mohammed, I
threw one leg over the saddle. Then, with a lurch that almost
sent me cartwheeling over its head, the camel heaved itself up
onto its feet with a grunt, and I was off on my "ship of the
desert," as the Arabs call the camel.
Rambo—for that was the creature's name—immediately
recognized that I was a camel-riding ignoramus. Without the
periodic "Hut! Hut!" of Mohammed, who flopped along in his
plastic sandals just behind us, Rambo would have come to a
stubborn stop. Sometimes he did anyway, voicing his anger with
a phlegmy hack like that of the Wookie in Star Wars. Now and
then, I got back at him and his insolence by clicking on and
off my tape recorder while taking notes; the unnatural sound
spooked him a bit, I think.
Seti I's unfinished obelisk lies abandoned in the
desert several miles west of Aswan.
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Conceding, however, that we were stuck with each other for the
rest of the day, we got into a kind of rhythm. Rambo jolted me
around like a mechanical bull, but I quickly learned to move
with him, gripping the saddle with my thighs and keeping my
back straight, like a skier on a mogul field. After awhile I
even stopped worrying about falling off.
The landscape grew steadily more striking. As soon as we got
past the ruins of the 6th-century monastery of St. Simeon,
which overlooks Aswan from a sandy ridge, great vistas of
golden sand swept off uphill, broken only by occasional
outcrops of eroded rock. Here and there, a towering wave of
dune, its smooth sides rippled like the surface of a lake,
hung in an eternal curl. Aswan vanished behind us, swallowed
by intervening hills.
With the sun hovering over my left shoulder like Big Brother,
I fell into a kind of a trance while watching Rambo's
lengthening shadow slide along the ground. I thought of that
scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence slips
into his own trance while crossing the desert to Aqaba.
Looking back at Rambo's rounded footprints in the sand, I was
surprised at how much each resembled a pair of cartouches, the
pharaohs' oval hieroglyphic nameplates. An endless string of
nameless cartouches. When Rambo stepped past a bone bleached
white as talcum powder, I said to myself, "Bones tell
stories," then snorted at how absurd that sounded.
Suddenly Rambo Wookied and jerked to a halt, startling me out
of my reverie. I had dropped the rein, the end of which had
fallen under his feet. Handing it back up, Mohammed shooshed
Rambo back into haughty complacency, and we continued on.
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Hieroglyphic carving on Seti I's fragmentary obelisk.
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Finally, late in the afternoon, we reached the obelisk. It lay
half-buried in the drifting sands, a fragment of its former
self. All that remained was the pyramidion and a small part of
the shaft. Even after 33 centuries of sandstorms and wind, I
could readily make out cartouches and figures etched into
three of its sides. The decorations are what fascinate
scholars about Seti I's lost obelisk. Before it was found, no
one knew when it was during the process of quarrying and
erecting that the pharaoh's artisans set to work on its
ornamentation. The quasi-obelisk of Gebel Simaan shows that
they carved at least some monoliths while they were still in
the quarry.
Not much else is known about Seti I's obelisk. Why was it
abandoned? Where did the pharaoh intend it to stand? What
happened to the rest of the shaft? Was its stone appropriated
for other building projects, or perhaps reshaped into a
smaller obelisk? Musing on these unanswerable questions, I
wandered about the site, stepping amidst a pastiche of
potsherds, bird tracks, and camel dung.
It was not until I clambered atop an outcropping that I
noticed the road. That's right, way out there in the desert, a
broad, paved road of rock-thickened sand. It swept in from the
direction we'd come right up to the obelisk, as if built just
for it. How had I missed it? By walking right along it as we
approached from the east, I'm embarrassed to admit.
The ancient road at Gebel Simaan, with the broken
obelisk in the foreground.
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I immediately thought of
Reginald Engelbach.
In his 1922 book on the Unfinished Obelisk, he suggested two
ways quarrymen might have wrestled obelisks out of a quarry:
lengthwise on a track of wooden rollers, or widthwise, by
rolling it over and over like timbermen do with newly toppled
trees. At 35 to 40 feet wide, the road at Gebel Simaan would
have been wide enough to handle a large, rolling obelisk,
which Engelbach calculated would only need support along a
third of its length. "[A]nd the tendency for the obelisk to
roll in a circle," he added, "would be to a large extent
neutralized if [the track] were of soft sand, where the heavy
end would sink in to a greater depth than the point end."
As we started home, I noticed that the road ended at the edge
of the plateau, not more than a quarter mile from the obelisk.
Did it disappear beneath the sand? Or would the Egyptians
simply have rolled the obelisk down the sandy hillside toward
the Nile? Two miles lay between us and the river. How many
laborers might it have taken to move it that distance?
We have one clue. Records show that Ramses IV dispatched an
expedition to Wadi Hammamat in southeastern Egypt to procure
some monumental stone. When it set out, the party numbered
more than 9,000 men:
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High Priest of Amun, Ramses-nakht, Director
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1
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Civil and military officers of rank
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9
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Subordinate officers
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362
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Trained artificers and artists
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10
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Quarrymen and stonecutters
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130
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Gendarmes
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50
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Slaves
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2,000
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Infantry
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5,000
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Men from Ayan
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800
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Dead (excluded from total)
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900
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Total
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8,362
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One line from the list keeps jumping out at me: "Dead
(excluded from total)." The list reveals not only how many
people were needed for such an excruciatingly difficult
enterprise, but also how many of them perished in the
undertaking. How many Dead (excluded from total) did the road
to Gebel Simaan claim, I wonder?
At dusk, we rounded the barren mountain Qubbet el-Hawa, or
"Dome of the Wind," and descended the final slope to the Nile.
The vanished sun still caught wispy clouds high overhead.
Before hopping on the boat for the trip back across the river,
I shook hands with Mohammed, paid him off, and cast a final
sneer at Rambo.
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Will the NOVA obelisk stand upright on this granite
plinth in a few days?
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Update on obelisk-raising: The ramp and obelisk are now
complete, and all the anchor blocks, which will aid in slowing
the obelisk's rotation, are now in place. The team is still
debating whether or not we'll use a counterweight to help tip
the obelisk upright. Tomorrow, Owain Roberts will lead the
attempt to load and transport a two-ton obelisk on the
specially designed barge.
Peter Tyson is Online Producer of NOVA.
Obelisk Raised! (September 12)
In the Groove (September 1)
The Third Attempt (August 27)
Angle of Repose (March 25)
A Tale of Two Obelisks (March 24)
Rising Toward the Sun (March 23)
Into Position (March 22)
On an Anthill in Aswan (March 21)
Ready to Go (March 20)
Gifts of the River (March 19)
By Camel to a Lost Obelisk (March 18)
The Unfinished Obelisk (March 16)
Pulling Together (March 14)
Balloon Flight Over Ancient Thebes (March 12)
The Queen Who Would Be King (March 10)
Rock of Ages (March 8)
The Solar Barque (March 6)
Coughing Up an Obelisk (March 4)
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