Unfinished Obelisk

Unfinished Obelisk

Unfinished Obelisk

Unfinished Obelisk

There are two unfinished obelisks in the vicinity of Aswan. The closet, and most visited, is about 1.5 Km from town. This huge discarded obelisk belongs to Queen Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut Unfinished Obelisk would have been the heaviest obelisk ever cut in Ancient Egypt, weighing nearly 1100 tons. The Unfinished Obelisk lies on the edge of the northern granite quarries that supplied the ancient Egyptians with most of the hard stone used in Pyramids and temples. 

Three sides of the shaft, which is nearly 42 m long, were completed except for the inscriptions and it would have been the largest single piece of stone ever handled if a flaw had not appeared in the granite. So it lies there, where the disappointed stonemasons abandoned it, still partly attached to parent rock and with no indication of what it was intended for.