The quarrying

    Many different kinds of rock were quarried:

• Red, grey and black granite near Aswan,
• limestone near Memphis in the Muqattam hills,
• sandstone in the Red Mountains and of lesser quality in all the three southern nomes,
• alabaster - a few hours' walking from El Amarna,
• diorite at a three days' march distance west of Idahet in barren desert terrain, abandoned during the Middle Kingdom, which even the Ramessides, with abundant slave labour available, did not reactivate,
• marble,
• serpentine,
• the purple porphyry found only on Jabal Abu Dukhan, important above all to the Roman emperors,
• black slate three days from Koptos in Wadi Rohanu, where the workmen left inscriptions and reliefs,
• basalt and
• dolomite. 

    Some of them, limestone above all, were used in huge quantities. The Khufu pyramid alone contains about 2.3 million blocks of limestone and granite, weighing up to 15 tons each.
    Yet, the quarries were not worked on a permanent basis. Whenever the need for stone arose, the pharaohs would draft workmen and send them by their thousands to the quarry.
    Ramses IV gathered 9368 workers under the leadership of thirteen high officials, among them the High Priest of Amen, his chief steward to get Bekhen stone from Wadi Hammamat. Twenty army scribes, experienced men, served as engineers and administrators. There were ninety-one soldiers responsible for the chariots, fifty policemen, fifty scribes assigned various duties and, perhaps somewhat strangely, two hundred fishermen. 5000 of the expedition members belonged to the army, 2000 to the temples and 800 were foreigners, Hapiru. 900 were officials of the central government, who didn't accompany the expedition to the quarry itself, but stayed behind. This whole mass of people was needed to enable the chief artisan, three expert miners, 130 quarrymen and stone-cutters, two draftsmen and four engravers to do their job, to haul the rocks to the river and food-supplies and water to the quarry.
    While they were on the job, food was scarce and water scarcer, some bread and beer and water doled out carefully. The gods were not forgotten and thanks were given to Min, Osiris and Horus.
    Whenever possible rocks lying on the ground were used, at first those close at hand. Later higher lying rocks were rolled downhill, breaking often, until Meri, an overseer, had the idea to build a sloping ramp on which the rocks could slide down. He was rewarded with ten statues, each five cubits tall.

Year 19, under his majesty the king of Upper and Lower Egypt NyMaatRe, son of Amenemhet, endowed with life, permanence, power like Re.
His majesty has ordered to bring him monuments from this august mountain, from the west of the wadi. The stone was being carved from this western mountain as it had been done before. These stones fell in such a way that they broke and not a pebble was left. Then the overseer of the works, herald of the audience hall, Meri says: One should make a ramp to extract the rock.
Then the ramp was built, these monuments were carved just as he had said. One had never acted so before.
Then he escorted ten statues of august [stone].
His team of quarrymen from the necropolis: twenty men. Workers: thirty men. Many mariners: 2000 men.

The stela of Meri
My translation of a French translation by Serge Rosmorduc
Inscription de Mery au Ouadi Hammamat

Quarrying with ancient tools was hard work. Even the relatively soft lime stone was difficult to cut with Old Kingdom copper saws, and chisels and hard stone like granite was worked with diabase - often called dolerite - hammerstones. Holes were cut into the rock, wooden wedges driven into the slots and moistened. The expanding wood cracked the rock. Doubt has been cast on wood being strong enough for the purpose, but no alternative theories for pharaonic stone extraction have been proposed.
The detached slabs were dragged to the riverside, loaded on barges, and shipped downriver.
Only temples and tombs were built in lasting stone. Houses and even royal palaces were constructed with adobe bricks and have largely disappeared. But even stone structures have decayed or were used as quarries.

An unfinished obelisk carved from the rock was not yet completely detached when it cracked. This is always a risk when quarrying. As layers are removed, the pressures on the freshly exposed rock change, different parts expand at different rates, and the rock reacts by fissuring. When these are more than micro fissures, the rock becomes useless.
    One can still see the pits made by diabase hammer stones, which were used to pulverize the granite in order to shape it. Wet sand and sandstone were then used to burnish the surface. This obelisk, if it had been successfully detached would have weighed more than a thousand tons, three to six times as much as ordinary obelisks.
The quarrymen tried to salvage part of the obelisk by recutting it, but abandoned the attempt.

The mountain of the west =>

The remains of the dwellings of the workers who built the tombs of their pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. More remains of these humble abodes than of most royal palaces.
Most buildings in Egypt, palaces included, were completely or partially built of adobe bricks. With the raw materials, Nile mud and straw or the like, close at hand adobe buildings were cheaply and quickly built. On the other hand, even in a virtually rainless country these structures don't endure for more than a few generations.
Villages too distant from the Nile to make the transport of mud bricks worthwhile, had to be built with the materials available locally, in the case of workers' settlements near quarries, mines or tomb sites like Deir el Medine mostly stone.

Transportation

From a tomb at Saqqara =>

......... The stone was dragged with oxen which his m[ajesty] captured [in his] victories [among] the Fenkhu .........

18th dynasty quarry inscription
James Henry Breasted Ancient Records of Egypt Part Two, § 27

I inspected the erection of two obelisks ......... built the august boat of 120 cubits in its length, 40 cubits in its width, in order to transport these obelisks. (They) came in peace, safety and prosperity, and landed at Karnak ...... of the city. Its [track] was laid with every pleasant wood.

The biography of Ineni (18th dynasty)
James Henry Breasted Ancient Records of Egypt, Part Two, § 105

Questions have been raised as to how this was achieved and no conclusive answer has been forthcoming yet. Attempts at moving heavy loads by what are considered methods available to the ancient Egyptians were at least partially successful at showing how it could have been done. But the fact that scaled down versions, weighing tens rather than hundreds of tons, were handled leaves doubts in one's mind. Scaling up such methods is not always straightforward.
Moving a statue to a temple was a festive occasion with many spectators lining the road. The statue was loaded unto a sled, and, if made of soft alabaster for instance, carefully cushioned. The sled was pulled by four ropes manned respectively by soldiers, servants of the temple, men coming from the west and men coming from the east, while water bearers sprinkled water in front of it.

Working the stone

    A half finished relief in the tomb of Horemheb in the Valley of the Kings.

Whether they were producing reliefs or sculptures, masons and sculptors worked in teams. Draftsmen drew the outlines, masons with chisels and hammers did the carving, then the stone was polished and painters finished the job.

Cutting and drilling

According to W.M.Flinders Petrie the builders of the Gizeh pyramids had a sophisticated set of tools at their disposal

They comprised bronze saws over eight feet long, set with jewels, tubular drills similarly set with jewels, and circular saws. These were employed on the granite work, and perhaps saws of a less costly nature on the limestone The casing blocks were dressed by very fine picking or adzing. The system of using true planes smeared with ochre, for testing the work, shows with what nicety they examined their work, and what care was taken to ensure its accuracy and truth.

W.M.Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh

The application of ultrasonic machining is the only method that completely satisfies logic, from a technical viewpoint, and explains all noted phenomena. Ultrasonic machining is the oscillatory motion of a tool that chips away material, like a jackhammer chipping away at a piece of concrete pavement, except much faster and not as measurable in its reciprocation. The ultrasonic tool-bit, vibrating at 19,000 to 25,000 cycles per second (Hertz) has found unique application in the precision machining of odd-shaped holes in hard, brittle material such as hardened steels, carbides, ceramics and semiconductors. An abrasive slurry or paste is used to accelerate the cutting action.

Information provided by: http://www.reshafim.org.il