Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs

by Christopher Dunn

  It challenges: “Don’t just gape in awe and wonder, shake your head, and walk away. Bring me back to life! Know me—who I was and what I was. The only way to do this is to understand what I am and build another! Why am I smiling? Don’t think for a minute that I am content sitting here on my pedestal, misunderstood by the droves that have passed by for centuries. There is more here than meets the eye.”

  The Ramses challenge was issued in ancient Egypt again and again, from Memphis and Cairo to Luxor and Abu Simbel. Exact replicas of Ramses’ image were crafted in limestone, sandstone, quartzite, granite, and diorite. Some pieces, such as the Colossi of Memnon, weigh more than 1,000 tons. Other statues at Luxor weigh 600 tons. In fact, just the crowns that top the statues each weigh more than a ton. The statues are massive—a significant challenge to move and, because they are intricately carved, an even more significant challenge to sculpt. What distinguishes the Ramses statues is the iconic imagery of the perfect face. It seems that no matter which of the Ramses statues we look at, the same smiling face gazes through you, into infinity.

  In order to accomplish this effect, the ancient sculptors worked to a uniform system of measurement and a design scheme. Just as today we replicate designs using uniform measures and consistent methods of manufacturing, in ancient Egypt there was a system of design, measurement, and manufacture used to create the Ramses statues. We can then ask the question: What was the fundamental scheme that the ancient Egyptians used to create and re-create this iconic image in stone?

  In 1986, I visited Memphis, near Saqqara, and gazed down at the statue of Ramses in the open-air museum. Looking down the length of the statue, it struck me as peculiar that the left and right nostrils were identical mirror images of each other. It is common knowledge that no adult walking the earth has nostrils that are identically shaped. I thought it was noteworthy, but did not follow up and research it further as my focus at the time was on engineering, not art. I was there to study the pyramids and had not planned to visit any temples during my visit. I didn’t realize at the time, though, how important my observation would become to my future research.

  My interest in the Ramses statues was rekindled when I visited Luxor in November 2004. Though I had been to Egypt four times before and learned to love the Egyptian people for their hospitality and sense of humor, this was my first visit to the temples in Upper Egypt. Words cannot describe my feelings of wonder and awe as I absorbed the temples not only from a philosophical and spiritual aspect but also with my engineer’s brain. These temples impressed upon me indelibly that they were incredibly important from an engineering and scientific perspective.

  For an engineer or artisan, to walk through the Temple of Luxor is an exercise in humility. Combining the logical, rational, and objective attributes of left-brain functions with the intuitive, subjective, and holistic qualities of the right brain, the experience of seeing these temples is suffused with profound sadness for a civilization that had risen to great heights and then suffered a cyclic decline.

  In exploring what is left—the mere skeletons of the Egyptians’ achievements—and then going beyond, a veil is lifted to reveal the incredible material loss of a people who created perfectly crafted buildings and statues from the hardest stones known to humankind. This ancient culture accepted the challenge to develop the tools to work glasslike stone—stone that was created by tremendous forces within the earth and spewed, or squeezed, from its fiery belly—to a high order of magnitude, proportion, and exactitude.

  Basalt, diorite, and granite yielded to these ancient tools—the quartz crystals abundantly present in the granite and diorite gave way to the application of ancient technology now lost. Perfection was the goal, and the ancient Egyptians’ stone-working craft, as we shall see, was perfected to the extent that exactness was achieved.

  Even if our mind is not normally turned toward philosophy, a visit to Egypt soon finds our thoughts seeking refuge in ruminations of wonder at what once was and what could have (or must have) been had there not been an interruption. From the perspective of a philosopher, the mortality of physical existence is reinforced. We slowly realize that civilizations are like the human body—they have a life cycle. This is a discomforting thought for those who are faced with the implications of what Egypt’s accomplishments mean. We become comfortable to the extent that we can master our environment, but eventually we all must yield to the ultimate master. The natural cycles of the universe and their concomitant forces of nature unleash death and destruction with as much indifference and impartiality as they provide what is necessary for life to exist.

  The Temple of Luxor holds a message for our civilization—one that reaches across millennia through the ravages of time, and, though shaken, crippled, and on its knees, it implores us to pay attention.

  I was with a delightful, eclectic group of people on a tour of Egypt in November of 2004. The tour was arranged by Andrea Mikana-Pinkham of Body Mind Spirit Journeys, and presenting on the journey were my good friends Stephen Mehler and David Hatcher Childress. A broad range of people from various backgrounds, including engineers, a pilot, salespeople, a doctor, a nurse, a minister, and, from Florida, a sassy barmaid with an infectious laugh, milled around the bus every morning in anticipation of another great day in the field. Everybody was having a wonderful time, and we all had one thing in common: a deep respect for the Egyptian culture and its monuments. Good humor and jokes flew around the bus like the swallows that swirl around the Great Pyramid at dawn.

  Before 2004, I had not paid much attention to the temples in southern Egypt. Instead, I focused my attention on the pyramids and what I considered to be their more technical engineering attributes. As a part of this tour, I was fascinated by the story given by the Egyptologist tour guide, but I was not so fascinated that when an object caught my attention, I refused to wander off to do some exploring on my own.

  When you are part of a tour group, your visits to temples are strictly controlled. Generally, the tour operator takes you to Luxor at a time when it is the most visually stimulating: at night, when the temple is lit up with carefully designed and directed lighting. When you walk among the massive columns that reach to the sky like giant redwoods, the chattering of numerous tour guides fades as the power of the temple imposes its own majesty and voice onto your consciousness. This effect became more meaningful to me later, as my interest peaked and I began to learn more about the symbolic and philosophical interpretations that the temple has evoked from the hearts and minds of other researchers.

  THE SECRETS OF THE CROWN

  While our guide explained the meaning behind the intricately carved reliefs on the walls of the temples, several pieces of granite that were positioned in front of statues in the Ramses Hall—the first hall visitors enter after passing through the first pylon—managed to catch my attention. The explanations of the symbols on the walls suddenly lost their interest to me. Commanding my attention now were objects that appealed to a part of my nature that had been developed over many years of training and experience in manufacturing.

  I recognized the granite pieces’ faintly illuminated shapes as the cone-shaped crown of Upper Egypt: the Hedjet. Depicted as a white conical headdress in Egyptian art, images of the crown are found on the Narmer Palette and, famously, on the gold statue of the boy-king Tutankhamen. Another crown found in the Ramses Hall is the Pschent: a combination of the Red Crown of Lower Egypt and the White Crown that symbolizes the unification of the two Egypts. (See figure 1.3.)

  During this visit, I was able to examine them only visually and feel their smooth surfaces with my hand, but I was struck by their perfection of form, and I could not detect any deviation from a perfectly crafted contour. Throughout the course of my career, my hands have run across many different machined contours in order to find surface imperfections—and my contact with these Egyptian pieces seemed no different from my previous contact with objects that had been removed from a precision machining center. Except for some minor abrasion
s (presumably the result of the crowns falling to the ground) there were no pits or ripples or depressions in the compound curved surface. I felt only a flowing, exact surface that seemed as smooth as though it had been spun on a lathe. Because of its geometry, however, it would have been impossible to craft these crowns in such a manner. Along the length and width of each, the surface followed simple arcs that obviously were the result of careful deliberation in concept, design, and manufacture. From a cursory examination, it seemed clear to me that this result demanded adherence to geometry and precision in the manufacturing process.

  Figure 1.3. The Hedjet (front) with Pschent (back)

  This impression gnawed at me for a year, until I finally awoke to the realization that I had to go back and study them further. My opportunity to examine them again wouldn’t come until February 2006, when I went to Egypt with John Anthony West on one of his Magical Egypt tours.

  My main interest in going with West was to learn more about R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, who had spent fifteen years at Luxor studying Amun-Mut-Khonsu and had concluded that it was built using a system incorporating precise measures that were a deliberate representation of the universe and man. Amun-Mut-Khonsu is, according to Schwaller de Lubicz, a material expression of cosmic correspondences. His magnum opus was translated into English in two volumes titled The Temple of Man.1 It is considered a difficult work to understand, and West was one of the few people in the English-speaking world who knew Schwaller de Lubicz, supported his conclusions, and wrote about him in his own book Serpent in the Sky.2 A more recent treatment of Schwaller de Lubicz’s work is The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt, by Edward Malkowski.3

  Before traveling with West, I bought a Canon digital Rebel XT 8-megapixel camera, and I took my laptop with me on the journey. Had I known at the time what my camera would reveal to me, I would have taken a good tripod too. Regardless, there is not much time for careful photography while on a tour because of time constraints, so it was more a matter of taking typical tourist photos—but doing so while striving, as best as circumstances allowed, to capture centered images of the crowns so that later I could evaluate their symmetry on the computer.

  Because our visit to the Temple of Luxor was at night, I could not take the photographs I wanted of the crowns, so I photographed the Ramses statues and the bust near the obelisk outside as well as the obelisk itself, all the while attempting to keep the images square and the axis of the camera in line with the central axis of each object I was photographing.

  The next day, after our excursion to Denderah and Abydos, I had the bus drop me off at the temple instead of the hotel in order to photograph the crowns in daylight. At this time, I was able to get better photographs just before dusk—the sun had barely disappeared behind the wall of the Temple, so it did not cast any sharp shadows. This allowed for a very evenly lighted shot that minimized distortions of the symmetries of the objects I wanted to measure.

  To a certain degree, my session was successful, and I was able to ascertain with some certainty that these crowns spoke an untold story. I took a digital image of one of the crowns and loaded it into my graphics program. I then duplicated the image and made a transparency of it so that I could compare opposite sides to determine if they were symmetrical. I discovered that they were—to a remarkable degree of accuracy. (See figures 1.4–1.6.)

  This symmetry, of course, compelled me to ponder how it was accomplished. In order to reverse engineer and duplicate an object, we must determine precisely the geometry encoded in its design. A few clicks of the mouse later, I had an answer to at least part of the geometry.

  Figure 1.4. The first Hedjet original image

  Figure 1.5. The first Hedjet original image and a reverse transparency that is slightly off center was created so that the shadow line can be seen.

  Figure 1.6. The first Hedjet original image and a reverse transparency on center. Note the symmetry between both sides.

  Figure 1.7. Hedjet symmetry with identical radii

  Figure 1.7 is a photograph of the front view of the Hedjet. It was taken as close to the center axis as possible so that the symmetry of the piece could be measured. As it turns out, we can determine fairly conclusively that the crown was designed and crafted to incorporate a true radius of the same dimension on both the left and right sides when the Hedjet is viewed from the front.

  I analyzed another crown in the hall in the same way (see figures 1.8 through 1.10), and though it blends with the head of the pharaoh, it is crafted with a similar exact geometry.

  On the first Hedjet, toward the top of the crown, the contour of the granite starts to move away from a true radius and follows another contour. We could determine exactly what that contour is if the crown was intact, but instead we must examine other crowns that do not have their tops broken off.

  The next question that sprang to my mind was whether the radius was spun around a central axis—similar to the geometry on a bowling pin. Unfortunately, the answer to this question would take more time, because I had not taken any photographs of the Hedjet from the side—in fact, the question had not occurred to me until I was back at home, studying the photographs on my computer. When I was in the field, I was looking for symmetry and knew that the front and back were not symmetrical, so I didn’t bother taking any photographs from that angle.

  Figure 1.8. The second Hedjet symmetry with identical radii

  Figure 1.9. The second Hedjet original image and a reverse transparency that is slightly off center

  Figure 1.10. The second Hedjet original image and a reverse transparency on center. Note the symmetry between both sides.

  I was a bit chagrined that I didn’t have the presence of mind to take those photographs, but I continued working with the ones I did have and determined that I absolutely had to return to Egypt and finish what I had started—or at least I had to take this mode of inquiry to the next level within my reach. I believed that at Luxor I had discovered a quality and precision of manufacturing granite that rivaled or surpassed what I had studied near the pyramids in Lower Egypt.

  Because I had already taken two weeks of vacation, Judd Peck, the CEO of Danville Metal Stamping, my employer, was a bit perplexed when I asked for more time and told him that I needed to go back to Egypt when I had returned only a couple of weeks earlier. To convince him that the trip was legitimate, I shared with him what I had discovered in my many photographs.

  Judd Peck is the president and CEO of a gas turbine engine manufacturing company with 410 employees. He is also a member of the Illinois Bar and a well-respected attorney in the community with impeccable judgment and common sense. After viewing the photographs for thirty minutes, he nodded and said, “I see what you mean.”

  The next day, I received a surprise: Judd came to my office and asked me if I was traveling alone to Egypt. What he had seen must have inspired him—he asked if he could tag along and carry my tripod. Of course, I was delighted to have him as a traveling companion, and in the last part of April through the first part of May, we went to Luxor to continue taking more tourist photographs.

  As it happens, the quality department at Danville Metal Stamping had recently reviewed some new technology called Capture 3D. This uses digital photography to take a stereo image of a contoured surface and then imports the images into proprietary software. The accuracy of the surface is compared to a computer model design and the imperfections are highlighted. In the world of metrology—the science of measurement—it is a relatively new technology, but one that yields reliable results. Judd and I were part of a panel that reviewed the technology and, in doing so, learned about some of the other work that had been performed by the company, such as digitizing and creating computer replicas of the statues on the Charles Bridge in Prague, in the Czech Republic.

  With that resource in mind, I gathered some more equipment to assist me in my task: a sturdy Manfrotto tripod, a right-angle viewer, a telephoto zoom lens with macro focusing, and a wide-angle lens. Along with my dig
ital camera, I brought to Egypt a film camera that accepted the same lenses.

  The first day in Luxor we visited the Temple of Amun-Mut-Khonsu and spent about six hours there with very few tourists present. On this trip I discovered that it is best to experience the temples of Egypt in silence. I’m not sure how the ancients experienced these structures, but emanating from them—seemingly inversely proportional to the level of ambient noise—is a profound majesty. The hum of the city was an omnipresent background during my viewing, but within the colonnades and sanctuary of the temple itself, city sounds faded to insignificance and all was stillness and quiet. Similarly, on another trip that Judd and I took to Denderah, we were lucky enough to be there when all the tour buses had left. We spent several hours enjoying that temple in silence.