7 ms·

Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling (1983)

133 points by smitty1e 2y ago

Joker_vD 2y ago
...so it wasn't ancient aliens, with laser-cutting and other amazing technology? That's disappointing. I mean, if I couldn't imagine how it possibly could've been done, then it had to be the aliens, right?
- colibri727 2y ago
  [flagged]
- peutetre 2y ago
  > I mean, if I couldn't imagine how it possibly could've been done, then it had to be the aliens, right? That sounds right. I couldn't imagine how Indiana Jones 4 could possibly be such a bad movie. It turned out to be aliens.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- ganzuul 2y ago
  The technology is still used today. How is that not amazing?
- Radim 2y ago
  You snark, but please note the "[1983]" in the title. This article's points have since been expounded on, with new evidence both archaeological and experimental. Namely: > The concentric lines were not always perfectly parallel. 1. What the article calls "concentric circles" are, in fact, series of spirals. That is, a cutting point ploughing through the granite, round and round. And indeed the fine abrasive circles that this article manages to reproduce (image 7b) look nothing like the original fairly well-spaced, deep-cut grooves of the original hole (image 1a, all the way at the top). Petrie himself documented spiral grooves that span many drill rotations, sometimes totaling over 6 metres in a single continuous groove. This is well established and not disputed because the physical evidence is so plain. Why the OP failed to mention spiral grooves and talks about "concentric circles" instead is unclear, given they otherwise quote Petrie extensively. > [the hole] diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside. > …a tubular copper drill creates a more parallel drill hole since it cannot wear beyond the internal diameter of the drill. 2. By all accounts, the tubular drills were fairly thin. We know this because there are thin (overdrilled) circles at the bottom of discovered tube holes, up to 0.5cm in thickness of the tube wall max. There you can see the actual narrow width of the tube because the bottom wasn't sawn off as in the case of OP's particular sarcophagus. Again well documented by Petrie and others, supported by overwhelming physical evidence, so not a point of contention. The OP does not go into how the observed difference of 1cm compares to the wear of the (presumably thinner) "internal diameter of the drill". See for example [0] for a clearer, updated exposition. ---- To be clear, none of this is of course evidence for any "aliens". But reading your snark reminded me of those internet fly-by experts who deride honest work of others because "The science is settled bro, I saw a documentary on NBC! Aliens lol these other people are cretins!" I'd recommend turning off sound if Youtube amateur commentary irks you, but the breadth of physical evidence (photos and videos of actual stone artefacts, not theories around them) they display is astounding. Reading scientific papers (or watching NBC…) alone won't build you enough intuition and nuance for fly-by snarks. It is a complex topic, and not all amateurs are cretins. A bit of humility helps. [0] https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/ https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/
  - dtgriscom 2y ago
    I agree that they're misusing the word "concentric". However, I'd be very surprised if they truly overlooked the grooves being continuous spirals, as that would be extremely meaningful. Accepting your citation of Petrie, I'm actually surprised that the grooves were spirals, as that implies a cutter which makes significant progress in a single rotation, which seems unlikely in any stone, let alone granite.
    - Radim 2y ago
      Well yes, that's my point – the process is not trivial, with surprising technical details. For a more in-depth take on grooves – at least more in-depth relative to "concentric circles" or Lehner's "wet sand" video) check out my link above, https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/ https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/. Specifically on Petrie's testimony they offer this: > Of course, Petrie’s Core#7 does not bear any regular helices or a thread cut in granite with a fixed jewel point with a pitch of 2.0 mm, as it has been described by him. There is only a series of grooves, the formation mechanism of which is described above in detail. Their pitch, being very irregular, is not related to the advance movement of the tool cutting edge. Most importantly, they ran actual experiments on actual stones. And their theory for those grooves is a sort of emergent property of the accumulated effect of corundum grains falling into the same crest/trough pattern along the tube wall while drilling downward, leading to the observed series of (irregular) cut spiral grooves.
    - kragen 2y ago
      you could do it with a cutter that was itself a rotating grinding wheel i'm pretty sure the grooves are not actually spirals though
et1337 2y ago
The best part is the very end, where it is revealed that the study was done by two dentists.
- trwm 2y ago
  The whole thing reads like great literature. There should be a scientific magazine for papers that can be understood by the motivated layman. I accidentally read the whole thing in one sitting.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    For more of excellent writing read Derek Lowe's https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline His "Things I Won't Work With" series is particularly entertaining whilst remaining firmly scientific.
    - devilbunny 2y ago
      You misspelled “terrifying” there. I’ve never practiced chemistry, just got my B.S. and went to med school, but simply reading the names of most of those compounds made my blood run cold.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  The argument between the eminent Egyptologists that opens the article is frustratingly naive to anyone who has real experience in drilling and shaping hard materials. A dentist is, oddly enough, exactly the person I'd expect to write this article - academic enough to bother writing it, but practical enough to see the tool marks and have an insight into how they were made.
- unwind 2y ago
  ... and one of them has the last name "Gorelick" [1?]. Impressive study, happy I'm not a patient of his. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
skiter 2y ago
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Nykon 2y ago
I think respecting the cutting depth per rotation would give better clues and would make the the assumption actually comparable to "what they did" back then
jstanley 2y ago
> Photograph of a model of the bottom of the drill hole shows that lines are spaced closer together (arrow). This may be due to abrasive having become finer as drilling continued. Anyone who has drilled brittle materials will know why the lines got closer together. The feed pressure was reduced near the end of the hole to avoid chipping out the back surface.
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
This is one of the most intriguing ancient mysteries, and is sufficiently well grounded in engineering practice that it can be experimentally validated. Things like the hardness of the cutting edge, the RPM required to mimic the drill markings, the shape and progression of the drill bit etc. So, it's reasonably clear that the bronze-age Egyptians must have had some drilling rig for boring hard stone - one which operated at 1,000 rpm or similar and could make an impression into something like quartz. All the ancient aliens nonsense aside, this rig in itself must have been quite impressive in itself - probably a composite of pulleys and ropes with a tubular emery-embedded cutting bit. Would have loved to have seen it working!
- aixpert 2y ago
  *copper-age
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Bronze is a copper alloy, and there are Egyptian bronze objects dating back to the first dynasties of the Old Kingdom.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    I'm starting to think we should think of the pre-historic times as the "simple machine age". When I see the artifacts I'm left with the impression that these people had plenty of labor and they were exploiting and learning the use of simple machines. Everything they did could be explained by mastery of use gravity, ropes, and levers. If the materials used were primarily organic in composition the tooling would be long gone by now.
  - tokai 2y ago
    Always weird when people correct others with something that is wrong. Its bronze age. And if it was the copper age the correct term would be chalcolithic.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Pure copper is too soft and it has never been useful for most tools. The widespread use of copper for other purposes than jewelry has begun only after it became possible to produce in a reproducible way various alloys of coppers, now known as bronzes. The tin bronze, i.e. the alloy of copper with tin, has been discovered relatively late, around 5500 years ago, close to the time when writing has been invented, so we have much more historical information about the civilizations that used tin bronze. (The much cheaper brass has been discovered only long after the method of iron extraction, during the Greco-Roman Antiquity.) Nevertheless, for several thousands of years before, other copper alloys have been used, e.g. arsenical bronze or antimony bronze, so that is still "bronze age", even if it would be useful to differentiate between the ages of iron, of tin bronze and of other "bronzes". The Egyptian state definitely belongs to the age of the tin bronze.
DoctorOetker 2y ago
> (Note: Emery is a granular rock composed mainly of corundum—a crystalline compound of silicon and carbon—magnetite and spinel. Here, `emery’ and `corundum’ are used for the abrasive powders derived from these rocks.) Corundum is Aluminium Oxide (not clear if this is part of the original article?)
- CapitalistCartr 2y ago
  Yeah, carborundum is the correct word.
  - oersted 2y ago
    Reminded me of the witty: > Illegitimi non carborundum
  - kragen 2y ago
    emery is corundum (sapphire, aluminum oxide, α-alumina) and carborundum is silicon carbide (a compound of silicon and carbon)
deleted 2y ago
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dhsysusbsjsi 2y ago
Ben from UncharteredX has a good video on these drill samples, but does not buy into the mainstream acceptance of how they were made. In fact the granite core samples show continuous grooves and you can calculator the pressure per turn the mechanism was under, and it’s not really able to be done easily. https://youtu.be/KFuf-gBuuno https://youtu.be/KFuf-gBuuno
- Tor3 2y ago
  The core samples do not show continuous grooves, that claim has been thoroughly debunked. With visuals.
  - bjackman 2y ago
    You can even see the discontinuity clearly in the linked article
    - synecdoche 2y ago
      A discontinuity being an exception from a great majority of surface consisting of spiralling and continuous lines is no proof, nor debunking. A spiral form being an exception from a great majority of circular lines may be just that, an exception, and would point towards a non-spiraling cut. The photo with the discontinuity shows one side only. Therefore there is no way of knowing if and how the lines are connected on the obscured side, and no conclusion can be made either way.
      - deleted 2y ago
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      - abakker 2y ago
        Important to distinguish a spiral cut from a spiral ream. It is entirely possible to chip/drill/chisel a hole, and then to ream it out with a spiral tool.
  - synecdoche 2y ago
BostonFern 2y ago
There’s a 1995 PBS Nova episode in their Secrets of Lost Empires series which includes a segment on drilled granite. The episode features egyptologist Mark Lehner, stone mason Roger Hopkins, and ancient tool expert Denys Stocks. The episode mainly explores the question of how an obelisk was raised. The team ran out of time before they were able to reach a satisfying conclusion, but they returned to Egypt in 1999 to record another NOVA episode, which includes two competing theories on how to raise an obelisk. I highly recommend both episodes. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting08.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting08.... https://youtu.be/qeS5lrmyD74 https://youtu.be/qeS5lrmyD74
mhb 2y ago
Another theory: An initial undersized hole was drilled using any of the methods they suggest which produce no concentric rings. Then a single point boring tool was used to machine the hole to its final dimension. The hole tapers 1 cm over its length. 0.5 cm of wear of the single point tool in use would account for the decrease in diameter.
throwawaycities 2y ago
For what seems like every 100 YouTube channels that speculate on everything from lost civilizations to aliens there are some mundane channels that actually set out to demonstrate and reproduce technologies and works like the ancients. One of the more well known channels is scientists against myths, here is a link to one of their videos reproducing granite drill holes how the Egyptians might have: https://youtu.be/yyCc4iuMikQ?si=oUkmF122iHIklvuz https://youtu.be/yyCc4iuMikQ?si=oUkmF122iHIklvuz I really like their videos making granite and diorite vases, while the YT algo will tend to take you down the must have been lost technology/lost civilization/alien rabbit hole, sometimes you get lucky and they suggest other channels doing amazing work. The comments are fun too, no matter how well done anything is there’s always someone demanding demanding the small channels recreate the great pyramids at scale.
- bjackman 2y ago
  I'm getting a bit off topic here but regarding the pseudo-archaeology that's popular on YouTube: Graham Hancock (who had a 10 part Netflix series called Ancient Apocalypse about an advanced global civilization during/before the last glacial maximum) recently appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast alongside Flint Dibble who is an archaeologist that does public communication on YouTube. At least according to my own YouTube bubble it seems we are in a pretty big moment for pseudo-archaeology! Here's an informal discussion about it from Stefan Milo who I highly recommend for anyone intereated in prehistory: https://youtu.be/rWugM4XRPuc?si=EkO5PEAKRAIYYRJD https://youtu.be/rWugM4XRPuc?si=EkO5PEAKRAIYYRJD I have seen another good quality video summarising the debate on the podcast but annoyingly I cannot remember it to share, maybe someone else can share a fun resource (unfortunately the Joe Rogan podcast is way too long for me to actually listen to)!
  - throwawaycities 2y ago
    Graham has been appearing on Rogan’s podcast for years now. It’s Grahams exposure from Rogan that actually got Graham his Netflix show not the other way around. In terms of proliferation of “pseudo archeology” - whatever that is - yes, lots of people are realizing they can profit from this, so more content than ever is being created to monetize the attention capture. It’s not unlike flat earth content that people have been able to successfully monetize. It’s not all bad, Graham is no doubt responsible for getting people interested in history, archeology, and even geology. It’s really not societies fault they are ill equipped to exercise independent and critical thinking, much less the not having the skill sets, tools and resources to evaluate the existing archeological record. Though for the people that want to make a career out of it, I’d rather see them obtain formal educations and contribute in meaningful ways in lieu of the majority of the grifting type social media content…most people probably have the capability to become educated about the actual science and they’d also learn pretty quickly there is no vast conspiracy to hide history/prehistory as much of the monetized social media promotes.
art3m 2y ago
Some Russians were so annoyed about alien theories so they recorded a video how they drill the stone themselves using only ancient instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g305wqCdPRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g305wqCdPRs (English subtitles included)
- ArticlesGuitari 2y ago
  So convient to have a steel hammer and chisel to pop the core out. Egyptians OR ancient aliens is a false dichotomy. There is a third option which funnily enough the egyptians themselves believed.
- abj 2y ago
  It's obvious Egyptians could carve granite using stone instruments. What is worth more investigation, is how they carved symmetric granite vases within 1/100th of an inch precision.
  - kragen 2y ago
    nowadays, when people need precision to 1/100th of an "inch" (250μm in modern units) on soft materials like unhardened steel, they can use steel tools but when they need precision of 1μm or better (in medieval units, 1/25000th of an "inch"), or when they're cutting materials harder than steel, they resort to grinding with stone, typically emery (sapphire) for most of the grinding, followed by polishing. poor people who don't have steel tools also commonly do this for lower-precision work in soft materials; you can find all kinds of videos on youtube of people using angle grinders for things that a well-equipped machine shop would do with a bandsaw or milling machine similarly, to get the dimensional references to measure to, common shop work can use cast-iron straight edges. but, for more precise work, they resort to granite surface plates the egyptians of the old kingdom clearly had granite surface plates (they built significant parts of the pyramids' interiors out of them) and grinding, though they were evidently using the inferior quartz sand as their abrasive as for symmetry, the most likely explanation is that they used lathes; the oldest indisputable records of lathes are from new kingdom egypt, but rotationally symmetric work that seems to have been made on a lathe appears as far back as the old kingdom with respect to granite, while i don't doubt that you can find a granite vase here and there, most ancient egyptian fine stone carvings are from much softer rocks such as schist, alabaster (gypsum), and "alabaster" (calcite) so i would say the investigation has already been done and found convincing answers
abj 2y ago
If you're like me and want to some actual evidence, here's a video where they scanned and uploaded STL files from pre-dynastic Egyptian vases. https://youtu.be/QzFMDS6dkWU?feature=shared https://youtu.be/QzFMDS6dkWU?feature=shared
- alt227 2y ago
  This video is really frustrating. It spends the first 10 mintues trying to convince the viewer that these vases are not fake, yet has no evidence other than "There is no possible way these are fakes, just look at them!". Then he actively offers up that they have not performed this analysis on any museum piece vase which has been confirmed to come from an Egyption tomb or pyramid.
amai 2y ago
That might explain how they drilled holes into granite. But how did the ancient Egyptians carve hieroglyphs into granite?
- chris_st 2y ago
  With flint, evidently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQkQwsBhj8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQkQwsBhj8I
  - amai 2y ago
    That seems like a very primitive technique. I doubt this was what the ancient Egyptians used to carve e.g. the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#/media/File%3ARosetta_Stone.JPG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#/media/File%3A... or https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Merneptah_Steli_%28cropped%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Mernepta... I sometimes think they might have used some kind of acid (maybe in combination with sunlight) like modern https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography .
- throwaway173738 2y ago
  Probably with similar techniques. If you can spin a round thing against the same spot to make a hole you can certainly use the same materials and rub them in a straight line or along a curve. Hand woodworking involves painstakingly rubbing a little material off the work and then checking it, or shaving it off or cutting it off depending on where you are in the process. And you can also strike a soft metal against the stone to chip out a rough area before finishing and polishing. Inferior tools just have to be sharpened more often is all
RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
From the perspective of a person living in the US, it is technically correct that ancient aliens were responsible for all the ancient Egyptian artifacts. They were ancient in that they lived a long time ago and they were aliens in that they were not citizens or residents of the US. So yes, ancient aliens built the pyramids.

133 points by smitty1e 2y ago

...so it wasn't ancient aliens, with laser-cutting and other amazing technology? That's disappointing. I mean, if I couldn't imagine how it possibly could've been done, then it had to be the aliens, right?

colibri727 2y ago
[flagged]
peutetre 2y ago
> I mean, if I couldn't imagine how it possibly could've been done, then it had to be the aliens, right? That sounds right. I couldn't imagine how Indiana Jones 4 could possibly be such a bad movie. It turned out to be aliens.
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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ganzuul 2y ago
The technology is still used today. How is that not amazing?
Radim 2y ago
You snark, but please note the "[1983]" in the title. This article's points have since been expounded on, with new evidence both archaeological and experimental. Namely: > The concentric lines were not always perfectly parallel. 1. What the article calls "concentric circles" are, in fact, series of spirals. That is, a cutting point ploughing through the granite, round and round. And indeed the fine abrasive circles that this article manages to reproduce (image 7b) look nothing like the original fairly well-spaced, deep-cut grooves of the original hole (image 1a, all the way at the top). Petrie himself documented spiral grooves that span many drill rotations, sometimes totaling over 6 metres in a single continuous groove. This is well established and not disputed because the physical evidence is so plain. Why the OP failed to mention spiral grooves and talks about "concentric circles" instead is unclear, given they otherwise quote Petrie extensively. > [the hole] diameter on the outside is 5.3 cm. and tapers to 4.3 cm. on the inside. > …a tubular copper drill creates a more parallel drill hole since it cannot wear beyond the internal diameter of the drill. 2. By all accounts, the tubular drills were fairly thin. We know this because there are thin (overdrilled) circles at the bottom of discovered tube holes, up to 0.5cm in thickness of the tube wall max. There you can see the actual narrow width of the tube because the bottom wasn't sawn off as in the case of OP's particular sarcophagus. Again well documented by Petrie and others, supported by overwhelming physical evidence, so not a point of contention. The OP does not go into how the observed difference of 1cm compares to the wear of the (presumably thinner) "internal diameter of the drill". See for example [0] for a clearer, updated exposition. ---- To be clear, none of this is of course evidence for any "aliens". But reading your snark reminded me of those internet fly-by experts who deride honest work of others because "The science is settled bro, I saw a documentary on NBC! Aliens lol these other people are cretins!" I'd recommend turning off sound if Youtube amateur commentary irks you, but the breadth of physical evidence (photos and videos of actual stone artefacts, not theories around them) they display is astounding. Reading scientific papers (or watching NBC…) alone won't build you enough intuition and nuance for fly-by snarks. It is a complex topic, and not all amateurs are cretins. A bit of humility helps. [0] https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/ https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/
- dtgriscom 2y ago
  I agree that they're misusing the word "concentric". However, I'd be very surprised if they truly overlooked the grooves being continuous spirals, as that would be extremely meaningful. Accepting your citation of Petrie, I'm actually surprised that the grooves were spirals, as that implies a cutter which makes significant progress in a single rotation, which seems unlikely in any stone, let alone granite.
  - Radim 2y ago
    Well yes, that's my point – the process is not trivial, with surprising technical details. For a more in-depth take on grooves – at least more in-depth relative to "concentric circles" or Lehner's "wet sand" video) check out my link above, https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/ https://antropogenez.ru/drilling/. Specifically on Petrie's testimony they offer this: > Of course, Petrie’s Core#7 does not bear any regular helices or a thread cut in granite with a fixed jewel point with a pitch of 2.0 mm, as it has been described by him. There is only a series of grooves, the formation mechanism of which is described above in detail. Their pitch, being very irregular, is not related to the advance movement of the tool cutting edge. Most importantly, they ran actual experiments on actual stones. And their theory for those grooves is a sort of emergent property of the accumulated effect of corundum grains falling into the same crest/trough pattern along the tube wall while drilling downward, leading to the observed series of (irregular) cut spiral grooves.
  - kragen 2y ago
    you could do it with a cutter that was itself a rotating grinding wheel i'm pretty sure the grooves are not actually spirals though

et1337 2y ago

The best part is the very end, where it is revealed that the study was done by two dentists.

trwm 2y ago
The whole thing reads like great literature. There should be a scientific magazine for papers that can be understood by the motivated layman. I accidentally read the whole thing in one sitting.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  For more of excellent writing read Derek Lowe's https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline His "Things I Won't Work With" series is particularly entertaining whilst remaining firmly scientific.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    You misspelled “terrifying” there. I’ve never practiced chemistry, just got my B.S. and went to med school, but simply reading the names of most of those compounds made my blood run cold.
jdietrich 2y ago
The argument between the eminent Egyptologists that opens the article is frustratingly naive to anyone who has real experience in drilling and shaping hard materials. A dentist is, oddly enough, exactly the person I'd expect to write this article - academic enough to bother writing it, but practical enough to see the tool marks and have an insight into how they were made.
unwind 2y ago
... and one of them has the last name "Gorelick" [1?]. Impressive study, happy I'm not a patient of his. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym

skiter 2y ago

[dead]

Nykon 2y ago

I think respecting the cutting depth per rotation would give better clues and would make the the assumption actually comparable to "what they did" back then

jstanley 2y ago

> Photograph of a model of the bottom of the drill hole shows that lines are spaced closer together (arrow). This may be due to abrasive having become finer as drilling continued. Anyone who has drilled brittle materials will know why the lines got closer together. The feed pressure was reduced near the end of the hole to avoid chipping out the back surface.

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

This is one of the most intriguing ancient mysteries, and is sufficiently well grounded in engineering practice that it can be experimentally validated. Things like the hardness of the cutting edge, the RPM required to mimic the drill markings, the shape and progression of the drill bit etc. So, it's reasonably clear that the bronze-age Egyptians must have had some drilling rig for boring hard stone - one which operated at 1,000 rpm or similar and could make an impression into something like quartz. All the ancient aliens nonsense aside, this rig in itself must have been quite impressive in itself - probably a composite of pulleys and ropes with a tubular emery-embedded cutting bit. Would have loved to have seen it working!

aixpert 2y ago
*copper-age
- pavlov 2y ago
  Bronze is a copper alloy, and there are Egyptian bronze objects dating back to the first dynasties of the Old Kingdom.
- detourdog 2y ago
  I'm starting to think we should think of the pre-historic times as the "simple machine age". When I see the artifacts I'm left with the impression that these people had plenty of labor and they were exploiting and learning the use of simple machines. Everything they did could be explained by mastery of use gravity, ropes, and levers. If the materials used were primarily organic in composition the tooling would be long gone by now.
- tokai 2y ago
  Always weird when people correct others with something that is wrong. Its bronze age. And if it was the copper age the correct term would be chalcolithic.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  Pure copper is too soft and it has never been useful for most tools. The widespread use of copper for other purposes than jewelry has begun only after it became possible to produce in a reproducible way various alloys of coppers, now known as bronzes. The tin bronze, i.e. the alloy of copper with tin, has been discovered relatively late, around 5500 years ago, close to the time when writing has been invented, so we have much more historical information about the civilizations that used tin bronze. (The much cheaper brass has been discovered only long after the method of iron extraction, during the Greco-Roman Antiquity.) Nevertheless, for several thousands of years before, other copper alloys have been used, e.g. arsenical bronze or antimony bronze, so that is still "bronze age", even if it would be useful to differentiate between the ages of iron, of tin bronze and of other "bronzes". The Egyptian state definitely belongs to the age of the tin bronze.

DoctorOetker 2y ago

> (Note: Emery is a granular rock composed mainly of corundum—a crystalline compound of silicon and carbon—magnetite and spinel. Here, `emery’ and `corundum’ are used for the abrasive powders derived from these rocks.) Corundum is Aluminium Oxide (not clear if this is part of the original article?)

CapitalistCartr 2y ago
Yeah, carborundum is the correct word.
- oersted 2y ago
  Reminded me of the witty: > Illegitimi non carborundum
- kragen 2y ago
  emery is corundum (sapphire, aluminum oxide, α-alumina) and carborundum is silicon carbide (a compound of silicon and carbon)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dhsysusbsjsi 2y ago

Ben from UncharteredX has a good video on these drill samples, but does not buy into the mainstream acceptance of how they were made. In fact the granite core samples show continuous grooves and you can calculator the pressure per turn the mechanism was under, and it’s not really able to be done easily. https://youtu.be/KFuf-gBuuno https://youtu.be/KFuf-gBuuno

Tor3 2y ago
The core samples do not show continuous grooves, that claim has been thoroughly debunked. With visuals.
- bjackman 2y ago
  You can even see the discontinuity clearly in the linked article
  - synecdoche 2y ago
    A discontinuity being an exception from a great majority of surface consisting of spiralling and continuous lines is no proof, nor debunking. A spiral form being an exception from a great majority of circular lines may be just that, an exception, and would point towards a non-spiraling cut. The photo with the discontinuity shows one side only. Therefore there is no way of knowing if and how the lines are connected on the obscured side, and no conclusion can be made either way.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - abakker 2y ago
      Important to distinguish a spiral cut from a spiral ream. It is entirely possible to chip/drill/chisel a hole, and then to ream it out with a spiral tool.
- synecdoche 2y ago

BostonFern 2y ago

There’s a 1995 PBS Nova episode in their Secrets of Lost Empires series which includes a segment on drilled granite. The episode features egyptologist Mark Lehner, stone mason Roger Hopkins, and ancient tool expert Denys Stocks. The episode mainly explores the question of how an obelisk was raised. The team ran out of time before they were able to reach a satisfying conclusion, but they returned to Egypt in 1999 to record another NOVA episode, which includes two competing theories on how to raise an obelisk. I highly recommend both episodes. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting08.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting08.... https://youtu.be/qeS5lrmyD74 https://youtu.be/qeS5lrmyD74

mhb 2y ago

Another theory: An initial undersized hole was drilled using any of the methods they suggest which produce no concentric rings. Then a single point boring tool was used to machine the hole to its final dimension. The hole tapers 1 cm over its length. 0.5 cm of wear of the single point tool in use would account for the decrease in diameter.

throwawaycities 2y ago

For what seems like every 100 YouTube channels that speculate on everything from lost civilizations to aliens there are some mundane channels that actually set out to demonstrate and reproduce technologies and works like the ancients. One of the more well known channels is scientists against myths, here is a link to one of their videos reproducing granite drill holes how the Egyptians might have: https://youtu.be/yyCc4iuMikQ?si=oUkmF122iHIklvuz https://youtu.be/yyCc4iuMikQ?si=oUkmF122iHIklvuz I really like their videos making granite and diorite vases, while the YT algo will tend to take you down the must have been lost technology/lost civilization/alien rabbit hole, sometimes you get lucky and they suggest other channels doing amazing work. The comments are fun too, no matter how well done anything is there’s always someone demanding demanding the small channels recreate the great pyramids at scale.

bjackman 2y ago
I'm getting a bit off topic here but regarding the pseudo-archaeology that's popular on YouTube: Graham Hancock (who had a 10 part Netflix series called Ancient Apocalypse about an advanced global civilization during/before the last glacial maximum) recently appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast alongside Flint Dibble who is an archaeologist that does public communication on YouTube. At least according to my own YouTube bubble it seems we are in a pretty big moment for pseudo-archaeology! Here's an informal discussion about it from Stefan Milo who I highly recommend for anyone intereated in prehistory: https://youtu.be/rWugM4XRPuc?si=EkO5PEAKRAIYYRJD https://youtu.be/rWugM4XRPuc?si=EkO5PEAKRAIYYRJD I have seen another good quality video summarising the debate on the podcast but annoyingly I cannot remember it to share, maybe someone else can share a fun resource (unfortunately the Joe Rogan podcast is way too long for me to actually listen to)!
- throwawaycities 2y ago
  Graham has been appearing on Rogan’s podcast for years now. It’s Grahams exposure from Rogan that actually got Graham his Netflix show not the other way around. In terms of proliferation of “pseudo archeology” - whatever that is - yes, lots of people are realizing they can profit from this, so more content than ever is being created to monetize the attention capture. It’s not unlike flat earth content that people have been able to successfully monetize. It’s not all bad, Graham is no doubt responsible for getting people interested in history, archeology, and even geology. It’s really not societies fault they are ill equipped to exercise independent and critical thinking, much less the not having the skill sets, tools and resources to evaluate the existing archeological record. Though for the people that want to make a career out of it, I’d rather see them obtain formal educations and contribute in meaningful ways in lieu of the majority of the grifting type social media content…most people probably have the capability to become educated about the actual science and they’d also learn pretty quickly there is no vast conspiracy to hide history/prehistory as much of the monetized social media promotes.

art3m 2y ago

Some Russians were so annoyed about alien theories so they recorded a video how they drill the stone themselves using only ancient instruments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g305wqCdPRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g305wqCdPRs (English subtitles included)

ArticlesGuitari 2y ago
So convient to have a steel hammer and chisel to pop the core out. Egyptians OR ancient aliens is a false dichotomy. There is a third option which funnily enough the egyptians themselves believed.
abj 2y ago
It's obvious Egyptians could carve granite using stone instruments. What is worth more investigation, is how they carved symmetric granite vases within 1/100th of an inch precision.
- kragen 2y ago
  nowadays, when people need precision to 1/100th of an "inch" (250μm in modern units) on soft materials like unhardened steel, they can use steel tools but when they need precision of 1μm or better (in medieval units, 1/25000th of an "inch"), or when they're cutting materials harder than steel, they resort to grinding with stone, typically emery (sapphire) for most of the grinding, followed by polishing. poor people who don't have steel tools also commonly do this for lower-precision work in soft materials; you can find all kinds of videos on youtube of people using angle grinders for things that a well-equipped machine shop would do with a bandsaw or milling machine similarly, to get the dimensional references to measure to, common shop work can use cast-iron straight edges. but, for more precise work, they resort to granite surface plates the egyptians of the old kingdom clearly had granite surface plates (they built significant parts of the pyramids' interiors out of them) and grinding, though they were evidently using the inferior quartz sand as their abrasive as for symmetry, the most likely explanation is that they used lathes; the oldest indisputable records of lathes are from new kingdom egypt, but rotationally symmetric work that seems to have been made on a lathe appears as far back as the old kingdom with respect to granite, while i don't doubt that you can find a granite vase here and there, most ancient egyptian fine stone carvings are from much softer rocks such as schist, alabaster (gypsum), and "alabaster" (calcite) so i would say the investigation has already been done and found convincing answers

abj 2y ago

If you're like me and want to some actual evidence, here's a video where they scanned and uploaded STL files from pre-dynastic Egyptian vases. https://youtu.be/QzFMDS6dkWU?feature=shared https://youtu.be/QzFMDS6dkWU?feature=shared

alt227 2y ago
This video is really frustrating. It spends the first 10 mintues trying to convince the viewer that these vases are not fake, yet has no evidence other than "There is no possible way these are fakes, just look at them!". Then he actively offers up that they have not performed this analysis on any museum piece vase which has been confirmed to come from an Egyption tomb or pyramid.

amai 2y ago

That might explain how they drilled holes into granite. But how did the ancient Egyptians carve hieroglyphs into granite?

chris_st 2y ago
With flint, evidently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQkQwsBhj8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQkQwsBhj8I
- amai 2y ago
  That seems like a very primitive technique. I doubt this was what the ancient Egyptians used to carve e.g. the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#/media/File%3ARosetta_Stone.JPG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone#/media/File%3A... or https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Merneptah_Steli_%28cropped%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Mernepta... I sometimes think they might have used some kind of acid (maybe in combination with sunlight) like modern https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photolithography .
throwaway173738 2y ago
Probably with similar techniques. If you can spin a round thing against the same spot to make a hole you can certainly use the same materials and rub them in a straight line or along a curve. Hand woodworking involves painstakingly rubbing a little material off the work and then checking it, or shaving it off or cutting it off depending on where you are in the process. And you can also strike a soft metal against the stone to chip out a rough area before finishing and polishing. Inferior tools just have to be sharpened more often is all

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

From the perspective of a person living in the US, it is technically correct that ancient aliens were responsible for all the ancient Egyptian artifacts. They were ancient in that they lived a long time ago and they were aliens in that they were not citizens or residents of the US. So yes, ancient aliens built the pyramids.