Mons Porphyrites

About

A soldier named Caius Cominius Leugas discovered this outcrop in 18 CE, and it turned out to be the only source of imperial purple porphyry anywhere in the Roman world. Stone hauled across the desert on the Via Porphyrites eventually clad the Pantheon and Constantinople's imperial palace. By 117 CE the quarry had operated under direct imperial control for nearly a century, its purple stone reserved exclusively for the emperor's own projects.

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

• Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.57

  Egypt's red porphyry, quarried in unlimited blocks; Vitrasius Pollio brought the first statues of it to Rome under Claudius, to a cool reception.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mons_Porphyrites
• https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/mons-porphyrites-egypt/