The Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan is the largest known ancient monolith: 1,100 tons of granite, still attached to the bedrock, abandoned mid-construction roughly 4,000 years ago.
Reginald Engelbach, who excavated the Aswan quarry in 1922, recorded removing about 5mm of granite per hour with dolerite pounders. He then assumed the ancient Egyptians somehow achieved 8mm per hour, a 60% efficiency jump no modern test has replicated.
The scoop marks in the quarry trenches are the real puzzle: smooth, controlled grooves in one of the hardest stones on Earth, appearing in spaces too narrow to swing a pounding stone. Some follow curved paths around corners. Some appear on ceilings.
The same marks appear at Sacsayhuamán, Göbekli Tepe and Easter Island.
Full video:Â https://youtu.be/_YJ1A92GBx4
by AwakenedEpochs
7 Comments
Fascinating stuff!
Looks like it’s been handled like butter..
quarry using ancient tech
What’s the reason it’s unfinished?
I think that they used focused light to melt the stone and then actually did scoop it out
For scale are those 1 foot or 4 feet?
While these kinds of tool marks are absolutely an interesting find, I never understand why they are always used as evidence for ancient advanced technology/aliens/atlantis, or whatever theory they are used to support.
Ancient people were every bit as smart as us, and they were doing these things day in day out. They got *very* good at using the tools they had, and were able to do things with them that we in the modern day cannot because the skills have simply not been retained.Â
The note about the 60% efficiency jump that couldn’t be replicated sounds….perfectly expected to me? Do these archaeologists seriously think that they are anywhere close to the skill level of an ancient craftsman? Of course they can’t replicate it, they aren’t professional stonemasons that have been developing their skills for decades under the tutorship of other master stonemasons who are intimately familiar with these tools.
I genuinely feel that a lot of these conspiracies are rooted in a lack of understanding and a huge underestimation of ancient people.Â
Even over shorter timescales we see loss of skills that lead us to not know how to do things that previous generations achieved. In building the Space Launch System and Artemis programme for example, NASA have had to “rediscover” and develop through trial and error many things that were already figured out for the Apollo moon landings. Because the lineage of knowledge sharing was broken through decades of stagnation and many of the old guard retiring without training successors or documenting the intricacies of what they knew, that knowledge was never passed on and the new engineers have had great difficulties replicating some of the engineering achieved over 50 years ago. Now imagine that but over 4000 years.