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Meet the Team
Owain Roberts, Nautical Archaeologist
NOVA: What is your everyday work like, when you're not
called off to Egypt to help raise an obelisk?
ROBERTS: I'm concerned with reconstructions from the
remains of vessels. For example, a few months ago I worked on
a fourth century a.d. Celtic boat, where I reconstructed the
remains and produced what might have been a viable
ship—on paper of course. I've also nearly finished work
on a Bronze Age boat that was found in Dover. The work has
been going on for seven years now. I've done all the
reconstruction work and drawings and all the technical
calculations necessary for finding out how she might perform.
This is what I do with most of the boats I work on.
NOVA: Have you had any previous experience on a project
like the obelisk-raising attempt?
ROBERTS: I was involved in the NOVA Colosseum project.
Because of my background I had knowledge of rigs, both
medieval and classical, so I was able to interpret Rainer
Graefe's theories about how these covers might have been drawn
out over the colosseum and over the amphitheater we used in
Spain. I was also involved in the practical side of making all
the ropes the right lengths and splicing all the blocks
together and everything else.
NOVA: How important do you think your skills are to the
outcome of this new attempt to raise the obelisk?
ROBERTS: My son will do the rigging. (I shall, no
doubt, look over his shoulder.) My problem is to get one of
the small stones, the two-tonners, aboard a 23-foot boat
that's been built in Alexandria for this project. I've also
made two models of the Hatshepsut barge, [a hieroglyphic
relief by the pharaoh Hatshepsut that shows two obelisks on a
barge] and I've got a method to demonstrate of loading up the
barges with the obelisk.
Roberts' skill with ropes and nautical engineering
brought success to a NOVA project in which a roof was
raised over a small colosseum.
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I've looked at the strengths of ropes that they'll use and
I've been working out what they need, but engineers Mark
Whitby and Henry Woodlock in London have worked out the
method. My son's going out because he understands a lot of
rope work. He's a rock climber by hobby, although he's
actually a mechanical engineer for his work. But he'll be
putting most of the ropes on, I think, and getting it sorted
out and turning it into a practical thing. My contribution
will be on the nautical side, the shifting of the obelisks by
river from the quarry site to the erection site. But I
wouldn't be surprised if I get drawn into the other.
NOVA: What's your sense of how this attempt will be
different from the last one?
ROBERTS: I think there's much more of a determination
to solve the problems before we get there, and I think it
could well be successful.
NOVA: What do you expect to learn from this
experience?
ROBERTS: Oh, I've learnt it all by now, by studying the
darn drawings and making these models and things!
NOVA: But isn't it a little bit different when you get
out there and actually have to work with the real physical
objects?
ROBERTS: Absolutely. I'm concerned that the 23-foot
boat will behave as I hope it will behave. The two model boats
with which I'll demonstrate moving large obelisks like
Hatshepsut did—I think that will probably work pretty
well. It's a bit of a surprise, but I've tried it out here, in
the bath, anyway. I made these models to an absolute scale, so
all the weights and the sizes are as they should be. But I
should be able to figure out a method that works. I think so,
anyway.
NOVA: How impressive do you think it is that the
ancient Egyptians pulled this thing off?
ROBERTS: Incredible, absolutely incredible. When you
think—there's a large obelisk that's broken, the
thousand-tonner—when you think they were happily going
to shift that down to the edge of the Nile and load it aboard
a ship and move it—they were not phased by anything like
that, were they? They were extremely good civil engineers.
They also knew their ships remarkably well, because they knew
about stability, they knew about loading, they knew
hydraulics, which is what it boils down to. They maybe didn't
have it out in numbers but they could do sufficient
calculation, enough to make things work. And they clearly were
working, because they would have never lifted a
thousand-tonner without having all that knowledge as a backup
to trying it.
NOVA: Do you think that the method you're going to try
was the method they used?
ROBERTS: I think it is, actually. I've been looking a
lot at the Hatshepsut drawings of the barge, and there are
more than enough clues in that to suggest that it was not a
single barge but rather two barges side by side. You know, the
Egyptians had problems with perspective, and I think we've got
a perspective problem here, which is explained by some of the
detail as being on a second barge, behind.
If you propped two smaller barges about 100 feet long side by
side, you can put two obelisks across them, and you've got
stability, and you're able to shift them. I want to show that
and prove it. It's a fairly original idea, but not totally.
Pliny writes about a method in which they used a double barge
like this. He's talking 1,500 years later, and I reckon that
techniques didn't change all that fast.
NOVA: If it works, don't fix it then?
ROBERTS: Exactly. It also tells us how the Egyptians
understood they could lift large weights like this without the
need for cranes, tackle, and all that sort of thing. So I hope
I'm going to improve on that - that's the intention.
NOVA: If you were a betting man, what odds would you
give this project of succeeding?
ROBERTS: Pretty good. There's a lot of very careful
thought gone into this one, and certainly what I've seen Mark
and Henry producing down in London there, they certainly have
been scratching their heads and getting proper ideas, doing
all the calculating work on it. Hopefully what I'm going to do
will also perhaps produce a new method for shifting very large
obelisks without capsizing vessels. I'm pushing the
boundaries. It'll be interesting to see how that works.
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| Updated November 2000
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