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Tagged “ancient-egypt”

• HIGH WONDER

  Serapeum of Saqqara

  How did New Kingdom and later Egyptian workers quarry, hollow, and dress roughly two dozen multi-tonne granite and diorite sarcophagi for sacred Apis bulls, then maneuver each finished box through narrow rock-cut galleries deep underground and lower it precisely into its burial niche?

  c. 1400 BCE – 30 BCE, New Kingdom through Ptolemaic period · Saqqara, near Memphis, EgyptAdded July 2026
• HIGH WONDER

  The Unfinished Obelisk of Aswan

  How did New Kingdom quarrymen, using nothing harder than dolerite hammerstones, set out to free a single 1,090-tonne granite monolith from solid bedrock — and what does the crack that stopped them reveal about the limits, and the method, of ancient hard-stone quarrying?

  c. 15th century BCE (New Kingdom, reign of Hatshepsut) · Northern Quarries, Aswan, EgyptAdded July 2026