Mons Claudianus Quarries
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.
In ancient writing
- CIL III 25 = ILS 2612 = I.Pan 39, Dedicatory inscription of the centurion Annius Rufus c. 103-117 CE
This inscription records that Annius Rufus, a centurion of Legio XV Apollinaris, was placed in charge of the quarrying works at Mons Claudianus by "the best emperor" Trajan.
Sources
Nearby
![](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/"Imperial Porphyry" - porphyritic metadacite to porphyritic meta-andesite (Dokhan Volcanics, Neoproterozoic, ~593-602 Ma; Mons Porphyrites, Red Sea Mountains, Egypt) 1 (25869817093).jpg?width=800)
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