What are the best monuments and tombstones？

In our series of materials for making Grave Monuments and memorials, we introduced granite, marble, sandstone, limestone, bronze, copper, slate and wood.

In this article, we will look at the use of granite in memorial signs, statues and Grave Monuments .

For thousands of years, people have been building monuments to commemorate leaders, gods, wars, and other major historical events. Although some of these monuments, such as the Egyptian pyramids, have been preserved for thousands of years, others have disappeared in history due to poor weathering in many cases. Granite preserves better than most materials for a simple reason. Among all the materials used for long-term commemoration, few are as tough and durable as granite.

Due to the way granite is formed, its atoms are arranged very tightly. This forms a structure that is difficult to decompose by the sun, wind, rain or ice. For external monuments and memorials, this makes granite an excellent choice that can stand the test of time.

Granite is much harder than other building materials and even heavier than some. For example, the weight of steel per cubic foot is approximately twice that of granite, and its hardness rankings are similar in the standard Mohs hardness table 1-10. Except for gems, no material is hard.

Surprisingly, one of the oldest granite monuments is located in New York City. The Central Park Obelisk, or the New York Needle, is one of three granite obelisks, originally erected in Egypt around 1450 BC. The trio known as the Needle of Cleopatra was relocated in Paris, London and New York. The fourth matching obelisk is still in Luxor, Egypt. The durability of granite can be seen from these "needles". After more than 3400 years of wind and sun, these "needles" still have a clear Egyptian mark.

The most common use of granite in monuments and memorials is tombstones. Because it can have a variety of colors, skilled stonemasons and carvers can mold it into various shapes and sizes. Granite provides us with countless combinations of tombstones and tombstones, which are found in cemeteries and memorial places in North America and Europe. .

Granite has replaced slate and marble as the first choice for tombstones in cemeteries. This adds innovative methods of marking stones. In the granite tombstone industry, an interesting new trend is the use of lasers to etch photos of people and pets onto the granite surface.