A lot of people have asked me questions about where did all the stones come from to build the pyramids and temples and tombs. I’m sure that the pharaohs mined as much of the rock locally as they could, but Egyptologists know that many of the stones were hauled down the river. All the red granite in the Giza pyramids for instance came from Aswan which is some 400 miles up river.

These photos are not in sequence. I took them at different times on our river trip and have put them together here for this post.

The first photo is just a place that we saw along the river. We saw many such places where we could see people mining stones. Many of them were very near the river, but others (like this one) were a ways back from the river.

In the second photo, these guys were loading the piles of rocks along the bank onto this river barge. It was all being done by hand, one stone at a time.

In the third photo, you can see just such a river barge at the bottom of the picture that is loaded with rocks. It’s delivering this load of rocks to the Hilton in Edfu which appears to have a major renovation under way.