To ascertain how much headway can be made by hand on this kind of work, I tried, on the bottom of the trench, to see how much I could remove by hand pounding. I found that, after an hour’s hard work, I had extracted about five millimetres off the surface of the foot × half-trench-width area. With practice I could perhaps have done more. I noticed that, if I threw the pounder down and caught it on the rebound, the granite broke up at a much greater rate; but to do this as a regular thing would certainly result in an accident, as occasionally the pounder rebounds at very unexpected angles. I am certain that they were not used entirely by hand in the regular work of cutting out the trench, as the work would go very slowly indeed, and, which is more to the point, it would not have the same regular appearance that it has. There is no doubt that very powerful blows were struck vertically downwards, sometimes with such force as to split the dolerite pounders into fragments.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the pounders were attached to rammers, and worked on the principle of the modern mindâlah, as the Egyptians call it, and with which they are very familiar. By this means two or more men could work from the top of the trench, while the third, working below, held the bottom of the rammer and directed the blows.

As to how the rammers were attached to the pounders—if such were indeed used—I am uncertain. It may have been done by having the base of the rammer made slightly concave, possibly bound with metal to prevent splaying, the pounder being held up in its place by a metal (iron?) ring, sufficiently large to expose enough bruising surface, but not large enough to let the pounder slip through or to scrape against the side of the trench. The ring would be held up by two metal bands or hide thongs attached to the body of the rammer. Another method of attaching the pounders would be by a leather strap, with a hole just small enough to keep the ball from slipping through.

(14) It might well be asked why they did not make flat surfaces for the rammer to bear on, and with some more convenient means of attachment. The explanation is that once the bruising part of the pounder had worn flat, it was of no further use, and a new part had to be selected; besides, the spherical pounders are of natural occurrence, and their great toughness would make any shaping a difficult process. There are signs that the local basalt, and even the granite, were sometimes used, apparently without much success, as they are far inferior to the dolerite in toughness. Since the pounders were imported, a certain economy was essential in making the maximum use of them before discarding [7].

[7] Hand pounding also must have been largely used for the face dressing, for examination of fissures, and possibly for undercutting. Some quite small hand-pounders were also found; these had no stain on them.

The pounding out of the trench has considerable advantages over other possible methods; these may be summed up as follows:

The bottom of the trench gives a certain amount of information as to how the labour was arranged. To work the maximum number of men, with the minimum chances of one interfering with the other, seems to me to be for each man to have two ‘feet’ marked out for him along the trench. Squatting with his back to the obelisk, he worked on, say, the right ‘foot’ of his task, putting his ‘spoil’ on to the left ‘foot’. (Handing it up would be a great waste of time, and not removing it constantly would reduce the bruising force of the blows almost to nil.) Each man during the spell, be it of days or weeks, sits with his back to the obelisk and works on his right ‘foot’. The next spell is on the same ‘foot’ but each man works facing the obelisk, and the process is repeated in exactly the same way for the two halves of the left ‘foot’ of their tasks. A glance at plate [III], no. 1, will shew how likely this arrangement is, as there is just room for a man to squat comfortably, and there is always the space of a ‘foot’ between him and his neighbour. The men at the top of the trench, if rammers were used, would be rather crowded, but not impossibly so.

The average width of the trench is about 0 m. 75 cent.; the work may have been measured taking into account a minimum width, but this is not necessarily the case, as in certain places, the width of the trench gets smaller and smaller as it gets deeper, and then suddenly opens out again. In any case I imagine that the workmen would find it false economy to narrow the trench too much, as the cramped position would make the work go more slowly. I suggest that the reason for the occasional narrowings is that one party knew that their spell was coming to an end at a certain level, and finished it quickly, knowing that someone else had to continue the deepening.

It will be noticed that the top-dressing, as seen at the pyramidion, plate [IV], no. 1, and the butt-end of the obelisk, is less regular than the pounding work in the trench; it seems that, with more space at their disposal, the workmen were given an area to pound, and left to arrange their method of doing it.