← All studies

Tagged “new-kingdom”

• 

  Abu Simbel Temples

  How did the builders of the 13th century BCE carve a temple 60 metres into a solid sandstone cliff and align it so that the rising sun would reach the innermost sanctuary on two days each year — and then, three thousand years later, how did modern engineers cut the whole mountain-temple into pieces, lift it 65 metres up a cliff, and reassemble it so faithfully that the sunbeam still arrives?

  c. 1264 BCE (19th Dynasty, reign of Ramesses II) · Abu Simbel, Aswan Governorate, EgyptAdded July 2026
• HIGH WONDER

  Colossi of Memnon

  How did New Kingdom Egypt quarry, load, and move two seated statues carved from single blocks of quartzite — each weighing on the order of 700 tonnes — roughly 675 km across the country to the Theban plain, and why did one of them 'sing' at dawn for two hundred years?

  c. 1350 BCE (18th Dynasty, reign of Amenhotep III) · Theban Necropolis, near Luxor, EgyptAdded July 2026
• 

  Great Hypostyle Hall of Karnak

  How did New Kingdom builders raise stone roof-beams weighing on the order of 70 tonnes onto columns 21 metres tall, and roof over a covered hall of some 5,000 square metres — and which of the proposed methods, giant earthen ramps or levering, actually did the heavy lifting?

  c. 1290–1220 BCE (19th Dynasty; built by Seti I and Ramesses II, on foundations begun earlier) · Karnak, Luxor, EgyptAdded July 2026
• HIGH WONDER

  The Osirion at Abydos

  Why did the builders of a delicate limestone temple raise, directly behind it, a stark megalithic hall of hundred-tonne granite sunk to the water table around a stone island — and does its archaic, 'cyclopean' style really mean it is older than the New Kingdom?

  c. 1290 BCE (19th Dynasty, reign of Seti I; original date contested) · Abydos, Sohag Governorate, EgyptAdded July 2026
• 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
• 

  Temple of Seti I at Abydos

  How did a temple that produced some of the most exquisitely precise painted relief carving in all of Egypt also become the birthplace of the world's most famous 'out-of-place artifact' — and what is really written on the eroded ceiling beam that so many mistake for a helicopter?

  c. 1294–1279 BCE (reign of Seti I), completed under Ramesses II, 19th Dynasty, New Kingdom · Abydos, Sohag Governorate, 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