The Unfinished Obelisk is a prime example of a Pharaoh-funded stuff up in Aswan, Egypt involving a 1,000 tonne rock carved into the ground – that will be left there forever!
The Unfinished Obelisk was ironically, almost finished and had been painfully carved out of the quarry as another useless, heavy religious monument before a large crack appeared, causing these ancient civilisation chippies a lot of grief before it was finally abandoned.
Reginald Engelbach also wrote about the Unfinished Obelisk and the issues involved with its construction.
The Unfinished Obelisk is a Very Old Mistake
Whilst I was walking alongside the Egyptian equivalent of Mozart’s unfinished symphony, I noticed that the Unfinished Obelisk was about the same length of a cricket pitch, and wondered if it was used for this purpose during the Pommy occupation.
The Unfinished Obelisk – Another Use?
I imagined Tony Grieg (he’s a former cricketer who was a commentator, and often sticks his car keys in the cricket pitch to see how moist it is) checking for cracks with his car keys in the Unfinished Obelisk pitch, however, this particular crack would have been large enough to swallow Tony Greig’s car, with him inside it as well.
In a short period of sympathising, I could imagine the Unfinished Obelisk engineer grieving over his de-registration from the Obelisk Engineering Society, forced back to the lowest ranked part of the quarry to crush rocks for the rest of his life.
With another rock. But with his luck, it would have cracked.
Where do you go after that happens, I wondered when you create an Unfinished Obelisk?
Check out more at The problem of the obelisks, from a study of the unfinished obelisk at Aswan and Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs.
For more stuff about Egypt, see:
- Aswan Egypt – River Nile Felucca Cruise Sights on Lake Nasser
- Egyptian Pyramids at Giza – Aren’t In The Middle Of Nowhere
- Egyptian Pyramid Construction – What Do They Look Like Inside?
- Abu Simbel Temples, Egypt – An Impressive Piece of Legoland
- Camel Rides at the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt. Try Avoiding Them!
- Unfinished Obelisk – D’oh, I stuffed it up!
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