A PARTLY-HEWN OBELISK STILL ATTACHED TO THE ROCK IN ONE OF THE ANCIENT QUARRIES
While the barbarians of Britain were building their rude huts, the Egyptians were carving colossal pillars for the Hall of the Temple of Ammon, pillars over 30 feet round, and painting them with colours which are still fresh after all this lapse of time. Even then they had been building with brick for thousands of years. The tomb paintings show the brickmakers puddling the alluvial soil with their feet, shaping the mud into bricks, and baking them hard in the fierce heat of the sun. Moreover these bricks endured for centuries, and still endure; whereas many of the red bricks made in England thirty or forty years ago are perishing fast.
Speculation is still going on as to how the Egyptians used to handle the enormous stones found in the ruins, and how they managed to place in position monuments like Cleopatra’s Needle. There is mention of certain engines having been used to lift the stones of the Pyramids, but what these engines were, nobody to-day can say with certainty.
Cleopatra’s Needle was roughly shaped on three sides in the quarry, before it was detached from the mother rock. The methods of detaching a monument from the rock show that the Egyptians were quite conversant with natural laws, that they possessed the ability to harness these laws in order to save human labour. How many modern craftsmen would succeed in separating one of these huge stones from the mountain-side, by using such simple things as a drill, some wooden pegs, and water? With these crude implements the task would be looked upon nowadays as impossible. Yet from obelisks still attached to the rock, it is obvious that such primitive appliances were sufficient to enable the Egyptians to perform their ancient miracles.
On the exact line where they desired to sever the stone, they cut a deep groove, and at frequent intervals along this groove they drilled holes, into which they hammered wooden pegs very tightly, until the tops were a little below the surface of the stone. Then water was poured on the pegs, and as it soaked into the wood they swelled, until the expansion of them all together was so irresistible that the rock was split along the groove.
Many huge pillars and statues were also sculptured in the living rock before being detached, for areas of rock have been found all marked off in squares with figures drawn on them ready to be carved by the sculptor. Like the stones of the Pyramids, many of these figures and monoliths were transported on sleds, others were dragged over rollers. It was a common practice to send thousands of men to some distant place, to cut out a giant block of stone, and bring it back for the use of the king. Ancient drawings showing gigantic statues being dragged along on sledges by armies of slaves, reveal to us how the transport was effected.
But there was the difficulty of erecting an obelisk when it had reached the spot for which it was intended. A weight of 186 tons, like that of Cleopatra’s Needle, is a tremendous problem to handle, yet the Egyptian engineers accomplished it successfully. Such a weight was actually small compared with some of the weights they tackled, for they moved and erected single stones weighing twice and thrice as much, that is weights up to nearly 600 tons.
If our engineers to-day were given the same problem, they would still have to puzzle over it, in spite of the giant cranes that could be brought to the spot to help them. The mammoth lifting machines designed by modern engineers were unknown in the days of the Pharaohs, yet the ancients were able to do work without them which we would find it rather difficult to do with them.
Ever so many theories have been propounded as to how they set up these huge blocks of stone. One suggestion is that the stones were dragged to the site and their bases placed in position; then in some way, perhaps by the use of giant beams over which the ropes attached to the top ends of the stones were passed, they were pulled upright, a little at a time. As they were hauled up, blocks of stone may have been slipped under them to carry the weight.
Other theories abound, but the likeliest theory of all is that the Egyptians built a big sloping embankment like that used in the construction of the Pyramids. Up this the obelisk was hauled, base first, until it reached the very top, and projected on to a bed of sand. Labourers shovelled the sand away from under the obelisk, just as ants dig the earth from beneath a mouse they want to bury, and as the sand was removed, so the base of the obelisk sank down, until it gradually tilted upright exactly in the position designed for it. No simpler, or more brilliant, way could be found of solving this difficult problem.