Nile Cruise - the quarry at Aswan
Mum drools over the Aswan granite. She even brought a lump home. Lots of the ancient Egyptian statues and obelisks were made from this rock which Mum says is more of a syenite than a granite. You can still see the shape of an obelisk in this quarry which was never raised, because it got two big cracks in it. It was originally marked out in the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, 3,500 years ago.
Mohammed our guide told us that the ancient Egyptians used simple principles of physics to extract these monuments, using the effects of heating, wetting and drying to open up existing joints in the rock. Then they'd wait for the Nile flood to come as near as possible to the quarry before shifting the blocks.
