Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients

by David Hatcher Childress

  “[T]here are several artifacts that almost undeniably indicate machinery power being used by the pyramid builders. These artifacts, scrutinized by William Flinders Petrie, are all fragments of extremely hard igneous rock. These pieces of granite and diorite exhibit marks that are the same as those resulting from cutting hard igneous rock with modern machinery. It is shocking that Petrie’s studies of these fragments have not attracted greater attention, for there is unmistakable evidence of machine tooling methods. It will probably surprise many people to know that evidence proving that the ancient Egyptians used tools such as straight saws, circular saws, and even lathes has been recognized for over a century. The lathe is the father of all machine tools in existence, and Petrie submits evidence showing that not only were lathes used by the ancient Egyptians, but they performed tasks which would, by today’s standards, be considered impossible without highly developed specialized techniques, such as cutting concave and convex spherical radii without splintering the material.

  “While digging through the ruins of ancient civilizations, would archeologists instantly recognize the work of machine tools by the kind of marks made on the material or the configuration of the piece at which they were looking? Fortunately, one archeologist had the perception and knowledge to recognize such marks, and, although at the time Petrie’s findings were published the machining industry was in its infancy, the growth in the industry since then warrants a new look at his findings.”

  Continues Dunn, “Having worked with copper on numerous occasions, and having hardened it in the manner suggested above, this statement struck me as being entirely ridiculous. You can certainly work-harden copper by striking it repeatedly or even by bending it. However, after a specific hardness has been reached, the copper will begin to split and break apart. This is why, when working with copper to any great extent, it has to be periodically annealed, or softened, if you want to keep it in one piece. Even after hardening in such a way, the copper will not be able to cut granite. The hardest copper alloy in existence today is beryllium copper. There is no evidence to suggest that the ancient Egyptians possessed this alloy, but even if they did, this alloy is not hard enough to cut granite. Copper has predominantly been described as the only metal available at the time the Great Pyramid was built. Consequently, it would follow that all work must have sprung from the able use of this basic metallic element. We may be entirely wrong, however, even in the basic assumption that copper was the only metal available to the ancient Egyptians. For another little known fact about the pyramid builders is that they were iron makers as well.

  “Without going back in time and interviewing the craftsmen who worked on the pyramids, we will probably never know for sure what materials their tools were made of. Any debate of the subject would be futile, for until the proof is at hand, no satisfactory conclusion can be reached. However, the manner in which the masons used their tools can be discussed, and, perhaps if we compare current methods of cutting granite with the finished product (i.e. the granite coffers), there may be some basis on which to draw a parallel.

  “Today’s granite cutting methods include the use of wire-saws and an abrasive, usually silicon-carbide, which has a hardness comparable with diamond, and, therefore, is hard enough to cut through the quartz crystal in the granite. The wire is a continuous loop that is held by two wheels, one of the wheels being the driver. Between the wheels, which can vary in distance depending on the size of the machine, the granite is cut by being pushed against the wire or by being held firmly and allowing the wire to feed through it. The wire does not cut the granite, but is designed to effectively hold the silicon carbide grit that does the actual cutting.

  “By looking at the shapes of the cuts that were made in the basalt items 3b, and 5b, one could certainly speculate that a wire saw had been used and left its imprint in the rock. The full radius at the bottom of the cut is exactly the shape that would be left by such a saw.

  “Mr. John Barta, of the John Barta Company informed me, that the wire saws used in quarry mills today cut through granite with great rapidity. Mr. Barta told me that the wire saws with silicon-carbide cut through the granite like it is butter. Out of interest, I asked Mr. Barta what he thought of the copper chisel theory. Mr. Barta, possessing an excellent sense of humor, came forth with some jocular remarks regarding the practicality of such an idea.

  “If the ancient Egyptians had indeed used wire saws for cutting hard rock, were these saws powered by hand or machine? With my experience in machine shops and the countless number of times I have had to use a saw (both handsaws and power saws), there appears to be strong evidence that, in at least some instances, the latter method was used.”

  Sir William Petrie’s observations bear out what Dunn is saying. The following are his notes on the coffer inside the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid:

  “On the N. end (of the coffer) is a place, near the west side, where the saw was run too deep into the granite, and was backed out again by the masons; but this fresh start they made still too deep, and two inches lower they backed out a second time, having cut out more than .10 inch deeper than they had intended...”

  The following concerns the coffer inside the Second Pyramid:

  “The coffer is well polished, not only inside but all over the outside; even though it was nearly all bedded into the floor, with the blocks plastered against it. The bottom is left rough, and shows that it was sawn and afterwards dressed down to the intended height; but in sawing it the saw was run too deep and then backed out; it was, therefore, not dressed down all over the bottom, the worst part of the sawing being cut .20 inch deeper than the dressed part. This is the only error of workmanship in the whole of it; it is polished all over the sides in and out, and is not left with the saw lines visible on it like the Great Pyramid coffer.”

  Petrie estimated that a pressure of one to two tons on jeweled tipped bronze saws would have been necessary to cut through the extremely hard granite. If we agree with these estimates as well as with the methods proposed by Egyptologists regarding the construction of the pyramids, then a severe inequity can be discerned between the two.

  Says Dunn, “So far, Egyptologists have not given credence to any speculation that suggests that the builders of the pyramid might have used machines instead of manpower in this massive construction project. In fact, they do not give the pyramid builders the intelligence to have developed and used the simple wheel. It is quite remarkable that a culture, which possessed sufficient technical ability to make a lathe and progressed from there to develop a technique that enabled them to machine radii in hard diorite, would not have thought of the wheel before this.

  “Petrie logically assumes that the granite coffers found in the Giza Pyramids were marked prior to being cut. The workmen were given a guideline with which to work. The accuracy exhibited in the dimensions of the coffers confirms this, plus the fact that guidelines of some sort would have been necessary to alert the masons of their error.

  “While no one can say with certainty how the granite coffers were cut, the saw marks in the granite have certain characteristics, which suggests that they were not the result of hand sawing. If there was not evidence to the contrary, I might agree that the manufacturing of the granite coffers in the Great Pyramid and the Second Pyramid could quite possibly have been achieved using pure manpower, and a tremendous amount of time.

  “It is extremely unlikely that a team of masons operating a 9-foot hand-saw would be cutting through hard granite fast enough that they would pass their guideline before noticing the error. To then back the saw out and repeat the same error, as they did on the coffer in the King’s Chamber, does nothing to confirm the speculation that this object was the result of hand work.

  “When I read Petrie’s passage concerning these deviations, a flood of memories came to me of my own history with saws, both power and manual driven. With these experiences, plus those observed in others, it seems inconceivable to me that manpower was the motivating force b
ehind the saw which cut the granite coffers. While cutting steel with handsaws, an object that has a long workface, and certainly one with such dimensions as the coffers, would not be cut with great rapidity, and the direction the saw may turn can be seen well in advance of a serious mistake being made; the smaller the workpiece, naturally, the faster the blade would cut through it.

  “On the other hand, if the saw is mechanized and is cutting rapidly through the workpiece, the saw could ‘wander’ from its intended course and cut through the guideline at a certain point at such a speed that the error is made before the condition can be corrected. This is not uncommon.

  “This does not mean that a manually operated saw cannot ‘wander,’ but that the speed of the operation would determine the efficiency in discovering any deviation that the saw may have from its intended course.

  “...Along with the evidence on the outside further evidence of the use of high speed machine tools can be found on the inside of the granite coffer in the King’s Chamber. The methods that were evidently used by the pyramid builders to hollow out the inside of the granite coffers are similar to the methods which would be used to machine out the inside of components today.”

  Inside the King’s Chamber

  Dunn says that tool marks on the inside of the granite coffer in the King’s Chamber indicate that when the granite was hollowed out, preliminary roughing cuts were made by drilling holes into the granite around the area which was to be removed. According to Petrie, these drill holes were made with tube-drills, which left a central core that had to be knocked away after the hole had been cut. After all the holes had been drilled, and all the cores removed, Petrie surmises that the coffer was then handworked to its desired dimension. The machinists on this particular piece of granite once again let their tools get the better of them, and the resulting errors are still to be found on the inside of the coffer in the King’s Chamber:

  “On the E. inside is a portion of a tube-drill hole remaining, where they had tilted the drill over into the side by not working it vertically. They tried hard to polish away all that part, and took off about 1/10 inch thickness all around it; but still they had to leave the side of the hole 1/10 deep, 3 long, and 1.3 wide; the bottom of it is 8 or 9 below the original top of the coffer. They made a similar error on the N. inside, but of a much less extent. There are traces of horizontal grinding lines on the W. inside.”

  Says Dunn, “The errors noted by Petrie are not uncommon in modern machine shops, and I must confess to having made them myself on occasion. Several factors could be involved in creating this condition, although I cannot visualize any one of them being a hand operation. Once again, while working their drill into the granite, the machinists had made a mistake before they had time to correct it.

  “Let us speculate for a moment that the drill was being worked by hand. How far into the granite would they be able to cut before the drill had to be removed to permit cleaning the waste out of the hole? Would they be able to drill 8 or 9 inches into the granite without having to remove their drill? It is inconceivable to me that such a depth could be achieved with a hand-operated drill without the frequent withdrawal of the drill to clean out the hole, or provisions being made for the removal of the waste while the drill was still cutting. It is possible, therefore, that frequent withdrawals of the drill would expose their error, and that they would have noticed the direction their drill was taking before it had cut a .200 inch gouge into the side of the coffer, and before it had reached a depth of 8 or 9 inches. Can’t we see the same situation with the drill as with the saw? Here we have two high speed operations where errors are made before the operators have time to correct them.

  “Although the ancient Egyptians are not given credit for having a simple wheel, the evidence proves that they not only had the wheel, they had a more sophisticated use for it. The evidence of lathe work is markedly distinct on some of the artifacts housed in the Cairo Museum, as well as those that were studied by Petrie. Two pieces of diorite in Petrie’s collection he identified as being the result of true turning on a lathe.”

  Dunn notes that Petrie did not identify the means by which he inspected the core, whether he used metrology instruments, a microscope or the naked eye. He also mentions that all Egyptologists do not universally accept Petrie’s conclusions. For instance, in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, author Lucas takes issue with Petrie’s conclusion that the grooves were the result of fixed jewel points. He states:

  “In my opinion, to suppose the knowledge of cutting these gem stones to form teeth and of setting them in the metal in such a manner that they would bear the strain of hard use, and to do this at the early period assigned to them, would present greater difficulties than those explained by the assumption of their employment. But were there indeed teeth such as postulated by Petrie? The evidence to prove their presence is as follows.

  a. A cylindrical core of granite grooved round and round by a graving point, the grooves being continuous and forming a spiral, with in one part a single groove that may be traced five rotations round the core.

  b. Part of a drill hole in diorite with seventeen equidistant grooves due to the successive rotation of the same cutting point.

  c. Another piece of diorite with a series of grooves ploughed out to a depth of over one-hundredth of an inch at a single cut.

  d. Other pieces of diorite showing the regular equidistant grooves of a saw.

  e. Two pieces of diorite bowls with hieroglyphs incised with a very free-cutting point and neither scraped nor ground out.

  But if an abrasive powder had been used with soft copper saws and drills, it is highly probable that pieces of the abrasive would have been forced into the metal, where they might have remained for some time, and any such accidental and temporary teeth would have produced the same effect as intentional and permanent ones...“98

  Lucas goes on to speculate that withdrawing the tube-drill in order to remove waste and insert fresh grit into the hole created the grooves. There are problems with this theory. Dunn says that it is doubtful that a simple tool that is being turned by hand will remain turning while the artisans draw it out of the hole. Likewise, placing the tool back into a clean hole with fresh grit would not require that the tool rotate until it was at the workface. There is also the question of the taper on both the hole and the core. Both would effectively provide clearance between the tool and the granite, thereby making sufficient contact to create the grooves impossible under these conditions.

  Says Dunn, “The method I propose explains how the holes and cores found at Giza could have been cut. It is capable of creating all the details that Petrie and myself puzzled over. Unfortunately for Petrie, the method was unknown at the time he made his studies, so it is not surprising that he could not find any satisfactory answers.

  “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.”98

  Ultrasonic Machining the Granite Core

  Says Dunn, “The most significant detail of the drilled holes and cores studied by Petrie is that the groove is cut deeper through the quartz than the feldspar. Quartz crystals are employed in the production of ultrasonic sound and, conversely, are responsive to the influence of vibration in the ultrasonic ranges and can be induced to vibrate at high frequency. In machining granite, using ultrasonics, the harder material (quartz) would not necessarily offer more resistance, as it would during conventional machining practices. An ultrasonically vi
brating tool-bit would find numerous sympathetic partners while cutting through granite, embedded right in the granite itself! Instead of resisting the cutting action, the quartz would be induced to respond and vibrate in sympathy with the high frequency waves and amplify the abrasive action as the tool cut through it.

  “The fact that there is a groove may be explained several ways. An uneven flow of energy may have caused the tool to oscillate more on one side than the other. The tool may have been improperly mounted. A buildup of abrasive on one side of the tool may have cut the groove as the tool spiraled into the granite.

  “The tapering sides of the hole and the core are perfectly normal when we consider the basic requirements for all types of cutting tools. This requirement is that clearance be provided between the tool’s non-machining surfaces and the workpiece. Instead of having a straight tube, therefore, we would have a tube with a wall thickness that gradually became thinner along its length. The outside diameter getting gradually smaller, creating clearance between the tool and the hole, and the inside diameter getting larger, creating clearance between the tool and the central core. This would allow a free flow of abrasive slurry to reach the cutting area.