Still lying in its quarry, cracked and abandoned, the great unfinished obelisk of Aswan is ancient engineering’s best confession. Reginald Engelbach’s The Aswân Obelisk reads the evidence — dolerite pounders, measuring lines, extraction trenches — to reconstruct how Egypt actually quarried and would have raised a thousand-ton monolith.
It is experimental archaeology before the term existed. Download the free EPUB.