Luxor, Egypt


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Canon EOS Elan, Kodak Gold 200 film, 28-80mm USM lens, February 1996

This is a portion of a broken obelisk inside the temple of Karnak, in Upper Egypt. There are two of these still standing inside the temple, one is 70 ft tall and the other stands at 97 ft and weighs in at over 300 tons. There is also one in Paris and a few in Rome, as well as the few that still dot the Egyptian landscape. It's amazing to see that they're each a single piece of stone, and like the pyramids, we still don't know how they were put in their places. The standing obelisks do just that - they simply stand by their own weight on a base without any kind of support. In Aswan, a few hundred miles south of here, there's what is called The Unfinished Obelisk. This obelisk still sits in its quarry because it developed a crack during mining and was abandoned. If it were completed, it is said that it would weigh in at over 1000 tons, making it the largest known.

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