The Romans drew stone of astonishing variety from across the empire. Specimen marble was aggregated (often into pietre dure tabletops) beginning in the 16th century for the Medici court and more recently for collectors on the Grand Tour. Here I map the Roman quarries and, as possible, link the stones they yielded. In Egypt, I also map the ancient quarries, many of which were coopted by the Romans. The industrious reader can, using these data, chart an expedition of stone scavenging sufficient to construct any masterpiece.
Roman and Egyptian stone
Egypt had been quarrying stone for three thousand years by the time Rome arrived. Harrell and Storemyr count just over two hundred ancient quarries, from the Late Predynastic into the Roman period: limestone from the Eocene cliffs along the Nile between Cairo and Isna, for the pyramids and tombs; sandstone from Isna southward, which from the late Middle Kingdom built the temples of the south; and granite and granodiorite at Aswan, for obelisks, colossi and sarcophagi. The ornamental hardstones came from the Red Sea Hills of the Eastern Desert, and it was there that Rome opened quarries of its own, at Mons Porphyrites for the purple porphyry and Mons Claudianus for a grey tonalite gneiss, and shipped their stone across the empire. The last ninety-two stones below are Harrell's scans of polished samples from the quarries of Egypt and Nubia.
Russell 2013, the Roman world Harrell and Storemyr 2009, Egypt
A library of stones
First the Corsi Collection in Oxford, assembled in the 1820s, then ninety-two stones from the ancient quarries of Egypt and Nubia. Click the stones for data.
Slab photographs © Oxford University Museum of Natural History, from the Corsi Collection of Decorative Stones. Stone names and quarry locations are the Museum's. Egyptian and Nubian stones scanned by James Harrell, from his Ornamental Stones (UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2013), figures 3–9, and Harrell and Storemyr 2009, figures 10–11, set on the Corsi slabs' dark ground to their shape.
Roman world from Russell, B. J. (2013), Gazetteer of Stone Quarries in the Roman World, version 1.0, Oxford Roman Economy Project (PDF), which collects the excavation reports and petrographic studies behind each site. Coordinates locate the nearest named settlement or the approximate area of the workings. Egyptian locations are from Harrell, J. A. and Storemyr, P. (2009), ‘Ancient Egyptian quarries — an illustrated overview’, in QuarryScapes (Geological Survey of Norway, Special Publication 12): 7–50, whose database reaches back to the Late Predynastic and so well before Rome, and from Harrell's own Archaeological Geology of Ancient Egypt.