(14) It might well be asked why they did not make flat surfaces for the rammer to bear on, and with some more convenient means of attachment. The explanation is that once the bruising part of the pounder had worn flat, it was of no further use, and a new part had to be selected; besides, the spherical pounders are of natural occurrence, and their great toughness would make any shaping a difficult process. There are signs that the local basalt, and even the granite, were sometimes used, apparently without much success, as they are far inferior to the dolerite in toughness. Since the pounders were imported, a certain economy was essential in making the maximum use of them before discarding[7]. [7] Hand pounding also must have been largely used for the face dressing, for examination of fissures, and possibly for undercutting. Some quite small hand-pounders were also found; these had no stain on them. The pounding out of the trench has considerable advantages over other possible methods; these may be summed up as follows: (_a_) It is eminently suited to unskilled labour. (_b_) The tools are durable, not easily lost and not liable to be stolen. {14} (_c_) Simultaneous rhythmic labour—so popular with the ancient and modern Egyptian—could be organized. The bottom of the trench gives a certain amount of information as to how the labour was arranged. To work the maximum number of men, with the minimum chances of one interfering with the other, seems to me to be for each man to have two ‘feet’ marked out for him along the trench. Squatting with his back to the obelisk, he worked on, say, the right ‘foot’ of his task, putting his ‘spoil’ on to the left ‘foot’. (Handing it up would be a great waste of time, and not removing it constantly would reduce the bruising force of the blows almost to nil.) Each man during the spell, be it of days or weeks, sits with his back to the obelisk and works on his right ‘foot’. The next spell is on the same ‘foot’ but each man works _facing_ the obelisk, and the process is repeated in exactly the same way for the two halves of the left ‘foot’ of their tasks. A glance at plate III, no. 1, will shew how likely this arrangement is, as there is just room for a man to squat comfortably, and there is always the space of a ‘foot’ between him and his neighbour. The men at the top of the trench, if rammers were used, would be rather crowded, but not impossibly so.