Hymettus Marble Quarries

Mons Hymettus

QuarryAchaea · Kareas, near Athens, GreeceBuilt 500 BCE

About

Quarrymen on Mount Hymettus, about 10 kilometers east of Athens, cut a bluish-white marble streaked with parallel gray veins for well over a thousand years. Roman builders favored the stone for columns, paving, and wall veneer rather than fine sculpture, since its coarse grain and greenish tinge suited architecture better than statuary. The Zeze quarry complex on the mountain's slopes still holds monolithic column drums and squared ashlar blocks that Roman-era quarrymen never hauled away. Carts and pack animals carried the cut stone down to ports on the Saronic Gulf for shipment into Athens and across the Aegean.

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.