Mons Claudianus
About
Named for the emperor Claudius who opened it, this Eastern Desert quarry supplied the gray granodiorite columns that still stand in the Pantheon and in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. A fortified settlement housed the quarry workforce ninety miles from the Nile, supplied along a road guarded by watchtowers. Ostraca left by the garrison recorded rations, wages, and water deliveries in exacting detail.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
Sources
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →