Egyptian Quarries

The pyramids, monuments, and tombs of ancient Egypt are thought of by both whithin the academic world and popular culture as models of beauty, grandeur, and durability. It is a testament to its strength the Great Pyramid at Giza is the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world to have survived (from The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World). They would no longer stand, however, if it were not for the peerless quality of stone masons and their medium, quarried granite and limestone. What do we know about the quarries at which these masons worked? How was the stone transformed from seemingly intractable bedrock into precise blocks? This website will provide answers to these questions as well as serve as a starting point for further research.

As a field of study, ancient Egyptian quarrying has been relatively ignored by 100 years of archaeologists', museums', and the public's interest in more "exciting" aspects of Egyptology, such as tombs and mummies. Perhaps Somers Clarke put it best in seminal book Ancient Egyptian Masonry in 1930:

"It is a great pity that no 'learned society' sends out a qualified person to make a complete study of the ancient quarries. the reason for this neglect appears to be that such a study would not be likely to furnish objects of interest to museums, to the securing of which new information is too often a secondary consideration." (Clarke, 1930)

In recent years, more and more research has been focusing on Egyptian quarries, notably Rosemary Klemm's Stein und Steinbrüche im alten Ägypten. ( Arnold, 1991) This is consistent with a general shift in archaeology towards an exploration of the daily lives of ordinary people as opposed to the exploits of the elite.

In order to properly look at ancient Egyptian quarries, it is necessary to break them down into soft (limestone, alabaster, etc.) and hard (granite, diorite, etc.) rock (the distinction is made by refering to a Measure of Hardness [MOH] scale). The processes utilized in the quarrying of soft stones will not necessarily work with hard stones and vice versa. [Note: For a statistical breakdown of different Egyptian building stones and their properties as reported in Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masonry. (Arnold, 1991), click here. The following pages will explain the quarrying techniques for both of these classifications and explain their differences.

Soft-stone quarries	Maps
Hard-stone quarries	About/Bibliography
Links