In 1932, when a British military vehicle was caught in a sandstorm about
65 km northwest of Abu Simbel, Colonel Hatton and Spinks Pasha stumbled upon the most remote stone quarries of Predynastic and early Pharaonic times the Gebel el-Asr Gneiss Quarries.
This area was the source of anorthosite gneiss (used primarily for
Predynastic and Early Dynastic funerary vessels) and the gabbro or diorite gneiss from which many royal statues were carved. Reginald Engelbach, escavating in 1933 and 1938 (Engelbach 1938; Murray 1939), discovered a number of Old and Middle Kingdom stelae, including a basalt slab inscribed with the cartouche of Khufu (Cheops), set up between a pair of gneiss slabs on a substantial dry-stone platform.
The Gebel el-Asr Project was set up to examine hard-stone quarrying
at the very limits of the early Egyptians' logistical, technological and organizational skills, in the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2686-1650 BC). This region is under threat from a new road to Gebel Uweinat and from an on-going hydrological project stretching westwards from Wadi Tushka (which could obliterate the site entirely). An emergency conference at Abu Simbel in 1998 asked for the quarries, and the nearby Neolithic site of Nabta Playa, to be given special protected status. The Gebel el-Asr Project is therefore very much a rescue operation.
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