| The Karnak Temple (Fig. 64), which
stood in the once vast city of Thebes, is like a great historical volume
telling us much of the story of the Egyptian Empire. Behind the great hall
(Figs. 66 and 68)
towers a huge obelisk, a shaft of granite in a single piece nearly a hun-
dred feet high (Fig. 65). It was erected
early in the Empire by the first great woman in history, Queen Hatshepsut.
There were once two of these enormous monuments (see Fig.
65), and it was no small task to cut out two siich blocks as
these from the granite quarries at the First Cataract, transport them on
a huge boat down the river (Fig. 61),
and erect them in this temple. But the queen did not stop with this achievement.
She even dispatched an expedition [NEXT]
FIG 61 TRANSPORTATION
OF QUEEN HATSHEPSUT’S 350-TON
The two obelisks are lying base to base on a large Nile barge some 300 feet long. The obelisks are each 97 feet long and weigh about 350 tons each, the two making a burden of some 700 tons in the barge. It is being towed by thirty tugboats in three rows of ten each. Each tugboat has thirty.two oarsmen, making nine hundred and sixty oarsmen in all. Under the guidance of the engineers in the other small boats these men towed the obelisks downstream from the granite quarries of the First Cataract to Thebes — a distance of about i~o miles. Under each obelisk we can see the sledge on which it was dragged on shore to the place where they were both set up in the Karnak Temple (Fig. 64). The scene is restored from a relief on the wall of the queen’s temple at Thebes |
109. The reign of Queen Hatshepsut, the first great woman in history |
