Gebel el-Silsila Sandstone Quarries
About
More than a hundred separate quarries along both banks of the Nile at Gebel el-Silsila, between Edfu and Kom Ombo, supplied the sandstone behind most of Upper Egypt's great temples. Extraction ran continuously from the New Kingdom through the Roman period, when the site was known as Silsilis. Quarry faces still bear tool marks and workers' inscriptions, along with the grooves cut to haul finished blocks straight to waiting river barges. The site's ancient Egyptian name, meaning place of rowing, points to its role as a major loading point on the Nile.
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
- Gebel el-Silsila quarry inscriptions, Demotic and Greek quarry texts, East bank Quarry Q34 Augustan-period corpus, c. 27 BCE-14 CE
On-site quarry marks record stone cut here for Roman-era building work at Dendera under Augustus.
Sources
Nearby
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