Unfinished Obelisk Tours & Tickets

The Unfinished Obelisk is the most useful ruin in Egypt, and it is not a ruin at all. It is a building site, abandoned mid-job around three and a half thousand years ago and left exactly as it was when the workers walked away. Everywhere else in Egypt you see the finished product and have to guess at the method. Here you see the method and never get the product.

It lies in the northern granite quarries on the edge of Aswan, still attached to the bedrock along its underside, three sides cut free and the fourth still joined to the parent rock. Had it been raised it would have stood around forty-two metres and weighed somewhere near eleven hundred tonnes, which would have made it comfortably the largest obelisk ever erected.

It was never raised because it cracked.

Why it was abandoned

Run your eye along the shaft and you will see the fissure. Granite is not uniform, and somewhere during the cutting a flaw opened across the stone. A cracked obelisk cannot be raised safely and cannot carry inscriptions across the break, so the entire investment of labour was written off and the quarry moved on. There are smaller trial cuts nearby where the masons appear to have started testing the rock elsewhere.

The obelisk is usually attributed to Hatshepsut, which would place it in the fifteenth century BC, and one theory is that it was intended as a companion to an obelisk of hers that now stands in Rome.

How they actually did it

This is the reason to come. Because the work stopped, the technique is visible in a way it is nowhere else.

The masons worked by pounding, not cutting. Granite is too hard for copper and bronze tools, so they used balls of dolerite, a harder stone, held in the hand or mounted on rammers, and crushed the granite away a little at a time. You can see the trenches they pounded around the shaft, roughly three quarters of a metre wide, just enough for a worker to crouch in. The floor of those trenches still carries the rounded pounding marks, and dolerite balls have been found on site.

There are no chisel lines, because there were no chisels that could do this. That single observation reorganises how most visitors think about Egyptian construction, and you can only make it by standing here.

What to expect on the ground

The site is an open quarry with walkways over and around the obelisk, some shade structures and an interpretation area. It is hot and bright and there is very little shelter, so this is not a midday stop if you can avoid it.

Allow thirty to forty-five minutes. Most Aswan itineraries bundle it with the High Dam and Philae in a single morning, and that grouping works well: the quarry shows you how the stone was got, the temple shows you what was done with it, and the dam explains why the temple had to be moved.

Is the Unfinished Obelisk worth visiting?

If you are interested in how anything is made, it is one of the most rewarding stops in Egypt and takes under an hour. If you are looking for beauty, it is a large piece of pink granite in a hot hole in the ground and you will be finished in ten minutes.

The honest test: at Karnak you will stand under a standing obelisk and wonder how they did it. Here is the answer. Whether you want the answer before or after is up to you, but having both in the same trip is the point.