The 1100 ton Unfinished Obelisk - Carved with Pounding Stones? An UnchartedX Investigation!

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I'm STILL in shock and awe! Ben, don't EVER stop! Thank You!

All the evidence you need that its not pounders, is that the site's caretakers have no fear of damage being done to the site by tourists using all the pounding-stones laying around. I would even be so sure those are pounding-stones and not stone ball-bearings.

how a detailed video like this doesn't garner more attention in the mainstream is bonkers I just cannot understand it.

My golf course moved a sand trap on the dogleg sixth hole. I was one of the 500 volunteers, we moved the grains of sand using needlenose pliers. The work took 14 months but I really felt privileged to be part of the task.

Some of the best evidence I've seen that this stuff wasn't done by pounding hard rocks with harder rocks is the fact that tens of thousands of tourists have had a go at a boulder with a dolomite pounding rock every single year....and the rocks remain more or less completely unchanged.

That shot of Yusef standing next to the broken top of a column that is so obviously machined is one of my favourites.

Its mind boggling just to think how this was achieved, but it's even more puzzling to understand why it needed to be done on this scale..

Awesome! Really great video. It must be so amazing to visit those places and see those things. Thank you for bringing them to us!!

Ben definitely brings a great presentation. It doesn’t have to be aliens but mainstream archaeologists must start over again on our timeline, etc…. THANKS

Thank you for showing the stereo image in its original format. Most people are unaware that a lot of photographs taken from that time period were in fact true stereo(3D) photographs captured using a stereo camera with two offset lenses to capture the depth effect that we percieve by having binocular vision. Your videos are a wealth of information with meaningful insight which is greatly appreciated.

The marks look like a hot ice cream scoop carved into butter. So interesting. Lost technology / machinery 100%. Amazing video. So thorough. I rewound many times to absorb. Thank you so much for this and all of your other videos!

The idea of using fire to weaken the granite is interesting. You mentioned the need to clean the resulting "mud" from the surface of the granite before "pounding" it but actually, ash and water don't produce mud, they produce lye. I just looked it up and hot lye can be used to assist in cutting granite with significant advantages, so there could be something there. Probably not with the pounding stones in the way described, but it seems plausible that it could have been part of a far more effective method. Anyway, incredible work as always! Thank you for these documentaries. They are the best around, hands down.

This video is already long enough....??? No..too short. Fascinating and I cant get enough of this stuff..more please. ..

The interesting thing about this is that they look around and see what tools are available to determine how things were done. I have done carpentry for years, and I don't need to see the tool to know exactly what tools were used and what methods were applied based on the work that I see... This is like finding an old wood ship and there is a small hand saw next to it. Then coming to the conclusion they built the whole ship with a 12" handsaw... Even though there are holes that were obviously drilled with pegs securing other pieces of wood together

I am blown away.... One of the best videos about ancient Egypt I have ever seen. Keep up the good work ! 👍

This was very helpful especially the LIDAR and close-up images. I think the answer is the work was done using the pounding stones but not always by holding them in two hands and hammering or bouncing them as everyone seems to want to do. Rather, excavation and removal of large amounts of stone was most likely done using force multipliers that smashed or swung the pounding stones into the granite or other stone surface. This would account for the broken pounding stones at Aswan, the layout of the scoop marks, the deep holes that barely fit a person (logs with pounding stones on their tips were dropped into them?), the undercutting or scoops on side walls (swing setup), the linear vertical marks on quarry walls (a series of logs hung from a beam along the cut?), the high ridges on some scoops (where the pounding device had an oblique swing action), etc. We need to keep in mind that wood and rope don’t last thousands of years out in the open so that explains why they aren’t found in these old rock quarries. Also, humans have known how to attach stone to wood for tens of thousands of years. And they’ve built siege machines out of wood ever since the first stone fortifications were constructed. So it makes total sense they would use wood and rope to create devices that could smash a pounding stone much harder and more accurately into a block of rock than could be done using the two-handed dressing approach used for smoothing surfaces. For example, the trenches around the unfinished obelisk were perhaps dug by hanging an overhead beam along the cut and attaching a series of logs that can be raised using ropes and then dropped from a certain height. No skill, great strength, ungodly endurance, etc. would be required to apply a great deal of force and accuracy with each drop of these “pounding logs”. Given enough logs the entire length of the trench could be worked at the same time by a small work crew. They’d probably be more expert in rigging and carpentry than masonry. I’m sure just about any group of dedicated quarry workers can experiment and come up with a myriad of useful setups once they realize the mechanical advantages that wood, rope, etc. can provide over hand pounding. This could explain why similar, though not exactly the same, type of pounding marks can be found at megalithic sites across the world.

I would ask them "how long has this specific tour been given? And then I'd ask them "why hasn't any new scoop marks formed by all the tourists that have come through and tried this themselves?"

The scoop marks, concavities, long and short ridges, curvatures underneath the obelisk totally remind me of marks and features left by a sandblaster in the investment material as dental castings are cleaned. This must have been a large, powerful, automated one with rotating blast nozzles pretty much serving the same purpose as a 3 axis milling machine. Who knows.

I would find much more plausible that the pounding rock was used as a tip of a battering ram log that was dropped and hoisted up for another drop. Doing it by hand would be insane, like hammering nails holding iron cylinder in your fist.