UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
Cairo Museum lies in the Nubian desert some 65 kilometres to the
north-west of Abu Simbel. Quarries were worked from the dawn of
Egyptian history (c. —2800).
Egyptian quarrying techniques depended on the kind of stone being
extracted. For limestone, they hollowed out galleries in the broad band of
Eocene cliffs that border the Nile and extracted the magnificent
blocks of finestone used to construct the Great Pyramids which were then
faced with blocks of granite. The sandstone deposits in the region of El
Kob, in Upper Egypt and in Nubia, were mined by open-face techniques.
For hard stone, the quarriers firstcut a groove around the block to be
extracted, and then at various points along the groove made deep notches
into which they inserted wooden wedges. These they wet and the swelling
of the wood was sufficient to split the block along the groove. This
technique is still used today in granite quarries. Is it a legacy from
Egypt?
The only tools used by the Egyptian stoneworker were the wooden
mallet and copper chisel for soft stones like limestone and sandstone, and
the pick, chisel and hard stone hammer for metamorphic rocks like
granite, gneiss, diorite and basalt. When the quarry was located far from the
Nile, an expedition was launched with sometimes as many as 14000 men
comprising officers and soldiers, porters and quarrymen, scribes and
doctors. Such expeditions were equipped to remain for long periods out of
Egypt and must have contributed to the spread of Egyptian civilization,
especially in Africa.
The skills acquired by stoneworkers in the early dynastic period led the
Egyptians, by the time of the Old Kingdom (c. —2400), to hew their
final resting-places in solid rock. Much before this date, from —3000 to
—2400, the building of tombs, planned as the dwelling-places of the dead,
had already led them to build imposing superstructures which, in time, with
the changes which occurred in architecture, led firstto the step pyramid
and then to the pyramid proper.
The Egyptian expertise in woodworking is brilliantly manifested in their
shipbuilding. The necessities of daily life in the Nile valley, where the river
is the only convenient thoroughfare, made expert boatmen of the Egyptians
from the earliest times. Boats occupied a prominent position in their
earliest works of art from prehistoric times on. Since in their belief an
after-life was closely modelled on earthly life, it is not surprising that they
placed models of boats in the tombs, or represented scenes of boat
construction and river scenes on tomb walls. They would even sometimes
bury actual boats near the tombs ready for use by the dead. This was the
case at Heluan in a burial ground of the first two dynasties, and at Dahshur,
near the pyramid of Sesostris III. But a more recent discovery is
extraordinary. In 1952, two great pits dug into the rock and covered with
huge limestone slabs were discovered along the southern side of the Great
Pyramid. In the pits, partially disassembled, but complete with oars, cabins,
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