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

by Christopher Dunn

  I found myself absorbed in thought as I went to work taking a set of photographs of artifacts that for months had consumed my mind with their overwhelming uniqueness. My thoughts turned to the recent Internet competition for the new list of Wonders of the World. I thought it was ironic that the Wonders of the World that I framed in my camera viewfinder on this visit were not even mentioned. In terms of beauty and the knowledge and skill they illustrated, the statues of Ramses II at Luxor and other locations in Egypt surpassed all other competition candidates in terms of advanced geometry and complex manufacturing precision in one of the hardest-to-work materials known to mankind. As I hope to demonstrate here, the statues of Ramses challenge the Giza pyramids themselves as the most perfectly engineered artifacts of ancient Egypt—and perhaps of human history.

  The polished glint of granite again compelled me to run my hand over its smooth, but now familiar contour. Again, I marveled at the feat of engineering and the fact that the granite crowns were originally placed on top of the heads of the Ramses statues that populate the precincts of the temple. Some of these statues are 40 feet tall, beyond the scrutiny of earthbound observers, yet the creators of these wonders had seen fit to place upon them crowns that were carved with, what I suspected from my examination so far, extraordinary exactitude.

  Setting to work with my camera, I began to take more photographs, and I captured the images I failed to get the last time I was in Egypt. This time, my camera was firmly mounted on a tripod stand with a remote shutter-release button.

  When I took the side-view photo of the Hedjet depicted in figure 1.7, I was unable to get a perfect right-angle view of the front because of barriers in the vicinity: A pillar was close to one side, and another crown was close to the other, but I was able to set the tripod to the side and obtain a shot at about 75 degrees. Upon review of the image, the answer to my previous question was answered: the side view of the Hedjet revealed that the contour on the front was also a true radius. Interestingly, though, at this angle, the radius had reduced in size by about 15 percent. (See figure 1.11; Radius B is 85 percent of Radius A.) Moreover, as the radius transitioned from the side to the front, the center point of the radius moved down slightly.

  Fortunately, there were other crowns to study, and I set up my camera to focus on another on the west side of the hall—one of three crowns that had been placed in front of three statues positioned between the columns. In taking the series of photographs shown in figure 1.12, I attached a compass to the tripod and moved the camera around the crown in 45 degree increments. When I analyzed the results in the computer, I was astounded at the amazing accomplishment of these ancient craftsmen and, more important, of the fact that they saw fit to design these crowns to incorporate such a difficult and complicated work of art and engineering. From a conceptual and design standpoint, designing the crowns in this way would be a fairly straightforward task, but did the designer have any idea what he was asking of the craftsperson who would cut his design into stone? He might have said to his friends, “Hey, want to see what I did to drive the guys in the shop crazy? I just made the design of the crown exponentially more difficult to manufacture.”

  Figure 1.11. The Hedjet, side and front

  Figure 1.12. Front, side, and angled view of a crown

  To accomplish such cutting today in one of the hardest natural materials known and with such a high order of precision would require specialized equipment and careful planning. What tools did the ancient Egyptian artists and engineers possess? Were the tools they used as sophisticated as the products they created? What I discovered was not the product of a simple mind. The crowns are sophisticated products with difficult and exact surfaces that would challenge any craftsman, even one who is trained in today’s methods and equipped with today’s tools.

  The next order of business was to take a photograph from the top of a crown looking down. My tripod was built so that I could extend a rod horizontally, but I discovered that the legs would not reach high enough above the crown to allow me to use it. This meant I had to hold the camera at arm’s length while hoping that the resulting photograph would be useful.

  The results were tantalizing enough to allow me to speculate that I could confirm more remarkable geometry if I could take a shot along the central axis of the crown, with all the features in full view. As it was, I had to be satisfied with what I had already obtained, because there was no way I could improve on the situation without building a platform. Preferably—and perhaps the Supreme Council of Antiquities will see fit to fund this one of these days—an engineering company should take a crown and fully digitize its geometry on a coordinate measuring machine or by some other technology accepted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, formerly the National Bureau of Standards.

  Nevertheless—imperfect shooting conditions aside—the results are noteworthy. From the top looking down, the crown at the widest point forms an almost full circle. It is interesting to note that in this view, the center point of the radius is off center relative to the top of the crown. This indicates that even though the upper right quadrant of the crown reveals less of the surface than the lower right quadrant, and the dotted line is theoretically touching the surface higher on the crown in the upper quadrants than the lower quadrants, there is still an almost perfect circle. This can mean only one thing that is extremely important to an understanding of the sophistication of the designers and carvers of this artifact: to rotate a round object and observe the same radius at a different orientation indicates that what is being observed is a sphere and that this basic shape was used to design the crown.

  Figure 1.13. Looking down on the circle geometry of the crown

  To illustrate this: if you have a tulip-shaped wine glass in your cabinet, examine its shape as you move it around in your hand. Essentially, you are examining surface geometry that is similar to that of these Hedjet of Upper Egypt.

  The wine glass is not exactly the same as the Hedjet, but it has the basic elements that contribute to the Hedjet’s shape: a large radius blending with a smaller radius at the bottom. The tilted glass illustrates how a smaller radius could be evident in the Hedjet and supports the idea that the Hedjet approximated a sphere—at least toward the bottom of the crown.

  If we look down on the wine glass, we can see that when it is tipped at an angle, the results are similar to those in the photograph looking down from the top of the Hedjet.

  Figure 1.14. Geometry of a wine glass

  Figure 1.15. Looking down on the wine glass

  From figure 1.15, then, it is clear that the geometry of the Hedjet was a sphere at the base and a sphere (the top knot) at the top. Between these two principle cosmic shapes, an infinite number of spheres were incorporated to form a perfectly smooth and precise surface. To understand how this works, we must examine an intact, unbroken crown that has escaped the ravages of time and abuse. One of the finest examples is found on the head of a statue at Karnak.

  The upper profile is a circle that is a cross section of a blend radius between the top knot (a sphere) and the body of the crown. The bottom profile is where the White Crown portion blends with the Red Crown portion, and where the two meet is a precise blend radius, as figure 1.16 illustrates.

  In figure 1.16, the blend radius of the White Crown (Hedjet) near the top knot, identified as A, and the surface geometry of the Red Crown (Deshret) identified as B, are profiles between which the surface of the Hedjet is smoothly rotated around the central axis of the crown. The images indicate that the radial profile of this surface changes in size as it sweeps around to the front—constantly reducing in dimension. After examining figure 1.16, we might ask if the geometry of the White Crown is fashioned after the shape of a bowling pin, for which the same radius profile is turned, as on a lathe or a potter’s wheel. As it turns out, this might indeed be the case. In figure 1.17, a series of spheres are drawn to fit within arcs based on the actual shape of the front of the Pschent, then are mirrored to create the
theoretical opposite side at the back.

  Figure 1.16. Front (left) and side (right) views of a Pschent at the Temple of Karnak

  Figure 1.17. The spherical nature of the Hedjet part of the Pschent

  The best description of the Hedjet is that it is similar to a bowling pin that is tilted on an angle and that when it’s combined with the Deshret it adopts precise geometries that make it more complicated to manufacture than a shape that could be produced on a lathe.

  This is easily said, but how did they accomplish this in hard granite? To understand what the ancient Egyptians were able to accomplish, it would help to discuss where art becomes secondary to engineering. Art does not require the degree of exactitude found in these crowns to convey a message or evoke an emotion. Art, in general, is thought of—and usually is—outside of architecture. It is free-flowing, intuitive, and unconstrained by what are typically regarded as left-brain functions (e.g., the logical, disciplined application of precise geometry and mathematics). To understand this, we can look at a modern artifact that was created by modern tools to represent Ramses and that finds its way into the homes of those who have traveled to Egypt or who shop online for Egyptian iconic statues.

  Figure 1.18 shows a statue that is obviously the work of a sculptor. As we can gather from the photograph, there was no expectation of precision in the manufacture of the object, and none was achieved. That wasn’t the objective for this object, and tools that would ensure precision were not employed in its creation. Bruno Walter, the famous orchestral conductor, said, “By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique, but by concentrating on technique, one does not arrive at precision.”4 A corollary to this is that in order to achieve precision, we have to concentrate on precision. There is no getting around the exactness we find in the granite crowns. They were not the result of random coincidence, but the application of tools and techniques that were far more advanced than the tools and techniques that are currently attributed to the ancient Egyptians.

  Figure 1.18. Souvenir statue of Ramses

  To find further illustration, we can examine briefly craftwork as it has been applied for many years. To the uninitiated, manufacturing plants might appear as behemoths that spew forth smoke and a stream of modern products. To the initiated, however, they are places where a very specialized subset of society and culture exists. There, institutional knowledge is passed from generation to generation and formal and informal hierarchies are established to create order and an understanding of how things should work. A casual visitor cannot recognize this. How could they? It may take some time spent in a manufacturing plant to learn that there are different skill levels and knowledge associated with those skills.

  Outside of manufacturing, precision has a different meaning. We may appreciate the precision of our cars and cell phones, though we are oblivious to the technologies that are employed in their creation. As products have flowed out of manufacturing plants to consumers these past fifty years, they have transformed the world. What we enjoy today is the result of a manufacturing evolution focused on meticulousness and consistency intended to eliminate variables in the manufacturing process.

  If we compare an automobile built fifty years ago to one built today, the changes are startling. Even if we look back thirty years to the mid-seventies and examine the fit and finish of our cars, we can see a huge difference in the precision of how parts fit together—the gap between a car door and the body, for instance.

  Another difference we see in consumer products is the rounding and stretching of once angular body shapes to flowing curves and organic shapes. Notice how lights with oval, shaped contours follow three-dimensional curves to blend smoothly with the body of a car. All of these qualities are made possible by the introduction of new technologies into manufacturing that allow artistic engineering design modeled in a computer to transfer to machines that create dies with an exactness that at one time would have been either too costly or downright impossible to accomplish.

  Because I have been involved in and witnessed these changes over the years, I have become familiar with definite surfaces and what was—and is—involved in creating them. Techniques have evolved from creating wooden or plastic models, and then tracing the models in machines in order to duplicate their shapes in hard steel to using computer models to generate instructions for machines to follow. I have run my hands over countless surfaces to check for irregularities and imperfections. The elimination of these imperfections has progressed over the years to what we have today. We now enjoy different kinds of aircraft, cars, refrigerators, televisions, and cell phones. They have a different look and a different “feel” to them than products of fifty years ago.

  Figure 1.19 is the punch part of a die that creates the inner hub for an aircraft engine assembly. The hub starts out as flat sheet stock and is formed around the punch to create the shape seen in the figure. Because it is a round and concentric object, its geometry is not as complex as those of the Egyptian crowns. The rounded end of the punch is an ellipsoid shape. Figure 1.19 illustrates the minimum number of radii needed to create the ellipsoid as well as the elliptical shape itself superimposed on the tool. The similarities between the die and the crowns lie in the precision and the “feel” of the surfaces. Also common to both are the concentric circles that comprise their geometry. To have made this piece fifty years ago, we would have used a template mounted to a rail at the back of the lathe along which a stylus traveled to guide the tool that cut the material. Today, such shapes are routinely described in a computer program and downloaded into the lathe’s computer memory for execution.

  Figure 1.19. Part of a tail cone die used to create the inner hub of an aircraft engine

  With the introduction of the ellipsoid, we can now look at the crowns in a different way. By drawing perfect ellipses and superimposing them on the photographs of the crowns, it becomes clear that the ancient Egyptians used this geometry, rather than a simple radius, in their design of the crowns.

  Figure 1.20. Karnak ellipse 1

  Figure 1.21. Karnak ellipse 2

  Figure 1.22. Karnak ellipse 3

  The implications of finding such overwhelming evidence of sophisticated geometry can be argued by scholars into the future. Suffice it to say that elliptical geometry is not generally discussed in association with Egyptian geometry. For the purposes of the discussion here, though, I am more interested in how the geometry was crafted with such exactness in hard granite. This, then, is why I believe the crowns at Luxor are so important. They do not have the “feel” of products made by hand. They do not have the “feel” or the geometry of products made with simple and primitive machines or tools. If you travel to Luxor and run your hands over their surfaces of the crowns, you can compare the “feel” of their smooth contours to those of your own car. These objects have the same kind of definitiveness and meticulousness as the dies that formed the body of your car. While you are online purchasing your ticket to Luxor, pick up your computer mouse and notice that it is crafted with compound radial surfaces. Contours that transition from large to small radii are products of precisely machined molds. We take them for granted, but there is an unseen world behind their creation.

  Figure 1.23. Karnak ellipse 4

  Figure 1.24. Ellipse of the first Hedjet of Ramses at Luxor

  Figure 1.25. Ellipse of the second Hedjet of Ramses at Luxor

  Figure 1.26. Ellipse of the third Hedjet of Ramses at Luxor

  Figure 1.27. Ellipse of the fourth Hedjet of Ramses at Luxor. Photograph of the seated statues of Ramses in Ramses Hall, taken with a telephoto lens from the Sharia al-Corniche, the road that passes between the temple and the River Nile.

  Figure 1.28. Ellipse of the fifth Hedjet of Ramses at Luxor. Note: Both figures 1.27 and 1.28 were taken at a distance in order to minimize the tilt of the camera from the horizontal plane. Even then, because of the height of the statues, the camera had to be tilted upward in order to capture the image.

  And yet supposedly
the crowns were crafted more than three thousand years ago. How could this be? How did the ancient Egyptians accomplish this? Why even conceive of such products if there were no tools to accomplish their making? What system of measure did they use?

  The ancient Egyptians were known to use grids in their designs.5 This indicates that they would have used what we know as Cartesian geometry, though undoubtedly they would have called it something different. Nonetheless, being in the same world as us, we can be assured that they were working in three-dimensional space and had identified the orthogonal axes of orientation that we know as x-y-z. They probably also had developed the concept of pitch and yaw, the rotational axes that are associated with navigation within three-dimensional space. For these constructs, too, the ancient Egyptians would more than likely have had their own labels.

  When fixing a Cartesian view to a crown that approximates the crown’s orientation on the Ramses head, we see that its contours are not simple lathed shapes, but instead, they change continuously by degrees while conforming to a shape that, when measured at any angle around the object, is a true radius or combination of blended radii that form an ellipsoid. The sweeping curved surface was not the result of a random burst of artistic whimsy and a flourish with the chisel. It was a decidedly disciplined, orderly application of a design with tools that have not yet been found in the archaeological record, but which were built to achieve the precise removal of material.