Transcendental technologies of ancient Egypt

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Let's turn again to one of the most ancient civilizations in the world and to one of the most mysterious countries - Egypt. Countless versions and controversies give rise to traces of the activities and structures of the ancients. Here are a few more questions to which there can only be fantastic answers.

At the turn of the III millennium BC. e. in Egypt, an inexplicable technological breakthrough took place practically from scratch. As if by magic, in an extremely short time, the Egyptians erect pyramids and demonstrate unprecedented skill in processing hard materials - granite, diorite, obsidian, quartz … All these miracles occur before the appearance of iron, machine tools and other technical tools.

Subsequently, the unique skills of the ancient Egyptians disappear just as rapidly and inexplicably …

Take, for example, the story of the Egyptian sarcophagi. They are divided into two groups, which are strikingly different in the quality of performance. On the one hand, carelessly made boxes, in which uneven surfaces prevail. On the other hand, multi-toned granite and quartzite containers of unknown purpose polished with incredible skill. Often, the quality of processing of these sarcophagi is at the limit of modern machine technology.

No less a mystery are the ancient Egyptian statues created from heavy-dutymaterials. In the Egyptian Museum, everyone can see a statue carved from a single piece of black diorite. The surface of the statue is polished to a mirror finish. Scientists suggest that it belongs to the period of the Fourth Dynasty (2639-2506 BC) and depicts Pharaoh Khafra, who is credited with building one of the three largest pyramids of Giza.

But here's the bad luck - in those days, Egyptian craftsmen used only stone and copper tools. Soft limestone can still be processed with such tools, but diorite, which is one of the hardest rocks, well, no way.

And these are still flowers. But the colossi of Memnon, located on the western bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, are already berries. Not only are they made of heavy-duty quartzite, their height reaches 18 meters, and the weight of each statue is 750 tons. In addition, they rest on a quartzite pedestal of 500 tons! It is clear that no transportation device would withstand such a load. Although the statues are badly damaged, the excellent workmanship of the flat surfaces that survived suggests the use of advanced machine technology.

But even the greatness of the colossus pales in comparison with the remains of a giant statue resting in the courtyard of the Ramesseum, the memorial temple of Ramses II. Made from a single piece pink granitethe sculpture reached a height of 19 meters and weighed about 1000 tons! The weight of the pedestal on which the statue once stood was about 750 tons. The monstrous size of the statue and the highest quality of execution absolutely do not fit into the technological capabilities of Egypt of the New Kingdom period (1550-1070 BC) known to us, to which modern science dates the sculpture.

But the Ramesseum itself is quite consistent with the technical level of that time: the statues and temple buildings were created mainly from soft limestone and do not shine with construction delights.

We observe the same picture with the colossi of Memnon, whose age is determined by the remains of the memorial temple located behind them. As in the case of the Ramesseum, the quality of this structure, to put it mildly, does not shine with high technologies - adobe and rough-cut limestone, that's all the masonry.

Many try to explain such an incongruous neighborhood only by the fact that the pharaohs simply attached their temple complexes to monuments left over from another, much more ancient and highly developed civilization.

There is another mystery connected with the ancient Egyptian statues. These are eyes made from pieces of rock crystal, which were inserted, as a rule, into limestone or wooden sculptures. The quality of the lenses is so high that thoughts of turning and grinding machines come naturally.

The eyes of the wooden statue of Pharaoh Horus, like the eyes of a living person, look either blue or gray, depending on the angle of illumination and even mimic the capillary structure of the retina!Research professor Jay Enochfrom the University of Berkeley showed the amazing closeness of these glass dummies to the shape and optical properties of a real eye.

The American researcher believes that Egypt achieved its greatest skill in lens processing by about 2500 BC. e. After that, such a wonderful technology for some reason ceases to be exploited and is subsequently completely forgotten. The only reasonable explanation is that the Egyptians borrowed quartz blanks for eye models from somewhere, and when the reserves ran out, the "technology" was also interrupted.

The grandeur of the ancient Egyptian pyramids and palaces is quite obvious, but it would still be interesting to know how and with what technologies it was possible to create this amazing miracle.

1. Most of the giant granite blocks were mined in the Northern Quarries near the modern city of Assuan. The blocks were extracted from the rock mass. It is interesting to see how this happened.

2. A groove with a very flat wall was made around the future block.

3. Moreover, the top of the block blank and the plane next to the block were also aligned. unknown tool, after the work of which there were even small repeating grooves.

4. This tool left similar grooves at the bottom of the trench or groove, around the block blank.

5. There are also many flat and deep holes in the workpiece and the granite mass around it.

6. At all four corners of the part, the groove is smoothly and neatly rounded along the radius.

7. And here is the true size of the block blank. It is completely impossible to imagine the technology by which a block could be extracted from an array.

There are no artifacts indicating how the workpieces are lifted and transported.

8. Sectional hole. Userkaf's pyramid.

9. Sectional hole. Userkaf's pyramid.

10. Temple of Sahura. Hole with evenly repeating circular marks.

11. Temple of Sahur.

12. Temple of Sahur. Hole with circular risks going at the same pitch. Such holes can be made with a copper tubular drill using corundum powder and water supply. The rotation of the tool can be ensured by means of a flat-belt drive from a rotating flywheel.

13. Pyramid of Jedkar. Basalt floor.

14. Pyramid of Jedkar. The leveled floor is made of basalt, the technology is unknown, as well as the tool with which this work could have been performed. Pay attention to the side on the right. The instrument may not have been driven to the edge for some unknown reason.

15. Pyramid of Userkaf. Basalt floor.

16. Pyramid of Menkaur. A wall leveled with an unknown tool. The process is supposedly incomplete.

17. Pyramid of Menkaur. Another fragment of the wall. It is possible that the alignment process is also incomplete.

18. Temple of Hatshepsut. Profiled detail of the facade. Good quality of machining of parts, groove sampling could be carried out with a rotating copper disc with the addition of corundum powder and water supply.

19. Mastaba Ptahshepsesa. Spiked block. The quality of the grinding of the edges is quite high; the spikes were probably a structural element. Technology unknown.

Here's some more information:

The Cairo Museum, like many other museums in the world, houses stone specimens found in and around the famous step pyramid at Saqqara, known as the pyramid of Pharaoh III of the Dynasty Djoser (2667-2648 BC). The researcher of Egyptian antiquities U. Petri found fragments of similar items on the Giza plateau.

There are a number of unresolved issues regarding these stone items. The fact is that they bear undoubted traces of mechanical processing - circular grooves left by the cutter during the axial rotation of these objects during their production on some mechanisms type of lathe. In the upper left image, these grooves are especially clearly visible closer to the center of objects, where the cutter worked more intensively at the final stage, and grooves that remained with a sharp change in the feed angle of the cutting tool are also visible. Similar traces of processing are visible on the basalt bowl in the right photo (Ancient Kingdom, kept in the Petri Museum).

These stone spheres, bowls and vases are not only household utensilsancient Egyptians, but also examples of the highest art ever found by archaeologists. The paradox is that the most impressive exhibits belong to the earliest period of ancient Egyptian civilization. They are made from a wide variety of materials - from soft, such as alabaster, to the most "difficult" in terms of hardness, such as granite. Working with a soft stone such as alabaster is relatively easy compared to granite. Alabaster can be processed with primitive tools and grinding. The virtuoso works performed in granite raise a lot of questions today and testify not only to the high level of art and craft, but, possibly, to the more advanced technology of pre-dynastic Egypt.

Petri wrote about this: “… The lathe seems to have been as common a tool in the fourth dynasty as it is in today's factory floors.».

Above: a granite sphere (Saqqara, Dynasty III, Cairo Museum), a calcite bowl (Dynasty III), a calcite vase (Dynasty III, British Museum).

Stone items like this vase on the left were made in the earliest period of Egyptian history and are no longer found in the later. The reason is obvious - the old skills were lost. Some of the vases are made of very brittle schist stone (close to silicon) and - most inexplicably - are still completed, processed and polished to a state where the edge of the vase almost disappears to paper sheet thickness - by today's standards, this is simply an extraordinary feat of an ancient master.

Other products, carved from granite, porphyry or basalt, are “completely” hollow, and at the same time with a narrow, sometimes very long neck, the presence of which makes the internal processing of the vessel obscure, provided that it is handcrafted (right).

The lower part of this granite vase has been processed with such precision that the entire vase (approximately 23 cm in diameter, hollow inside and with a narrow neck), when placed on a glass surface, accepts after swaying absolutely vertical centerline position. At the same time, the area of contact with the glass of its surface is not greater than that of a chicken egg. A prerequisite for such an accurate balancing is that a hollow stone ball must have perfectly flat, equal wall thickness (with such a tiny base area - less than 3.8 mm² - any asymmetry in such a dense material as granite would lead to a deviation of the vase from the vertical axis).

Such technological delights can amaze any manufacturer today. Nowadays, it is very difficult to make such a product even in a ceramic version. In granite - almost impossible.

Read more here about the secret of the SABU disk

The Cairo Museum exhibits a fairly large (60 cm in diameter or more) original product made of slate. It resembles a large vase with a cylindrical center 5–7 cm in diameter, with a thin outer rim and three plates evenly spaced around the perimeter and bent towards the center of the “vase”. This is an ancient example of amazing craftsmanship.

These images show only four samples of the thousands of items found in and around the step pyramid at Saqqara (the so-called pyramid of Djoser), which is believed to be the oldest stone pyramid in Egypt today. She is the first of all built, which has no comparable analogues and predecessors. The pyramid and its surroundings are a unique place in terms of the number of pieces of art and household utensils made of stone found, although the Egyptian explorer William Petrie also found fragments of such items in the area of the Giza plateau.

Many of Saqqara's finds have symbols engraved on the surface with the names of the rulers of the earliest period of Egyptian history, from the pre-dynastic kings to the first pharaohs. Judging by the primitive writing, it is difficult to imagine that these inscriptions were made by the same master craftsman who created these exquisite samples. Most likely, these "graffiti" were added later by those people who somehow turned out to be their subsequent owner.

The photographs show a general view of the eastern side of the Great Pyramid at Giza with an enlarged plan. The square marks a section of the basalt site with traces of the use of the sawing tool.

Please note that sawing marks on basalt clear and parallel. The quality of this work indicates that the cuts were made with a perfectly stable blade, with no sign of initial "yaw" of the blade. Incredibly, it seems that sawing basalt in ancient Egypt was not a very laborious task, because the craftsmen easily allowed themselves to leave unnecessary, "fitting" marks on the rock, which, if hand cut, would be a waste of time and effort. These "try-in" cuts are not the only ones here, several similar marks from a stable and easy-cutting tool can be found within a radius of 10 meters from this place. Along with horizontal there are vertical parallel grooves (see below).

Not far from this place, we can also see cuts (see above), passing along the stone, as they say, in passing, along a tangent line. In most cases, it is noticeable that these "saws" have clean and smooth, consistently parallel grooves, even at the very beginning of the "saw" contact with the stone. These marks in the stone do not show any signs of instability or "saw shake" that would be expected when sawing with a long blade with a longitudinal manual return, especially when starting to cut in a stone as hard as basalt. There is an option that in this case some protruding part of the rock was cut off, to put it simply, a "bump", which is very difficult to explain without a high initial speed of "cutting" of the blade.

Another interesting detail is the use of drilling technology in ancient Egypt. As Petrie wrote, “Drilled channels range from 1/4" (0.63 cm) to 5 "(12.7 cm) in diameter, and runout from 1/30 (0.8 mm) to 1/5 (~ 5 mm) in. The smallest hole found in granite is 2 inches (~ 5 cm) in diameter."

Today, channels up to 18 cm in diameter drilled in granite are already known (see below).

The granite product shown in the picture, drilled with a tubular drill, was shown in 1996 at the Cairo Museum without any accompanying information or comments from the museum staff. The photograph clearly shows circular spiral grooves in the open areas of the product, which are absolutely identical to each other. The characteristic "rotational" pattern of these channels seems to confirm Petri's observations on the method of removing part of the granite by pre-drilling a kind of "chain" of holes.

However, if you look closely at the ancient Egyptian artifacts, it becomes clear that drilling holes in stones, even the hardest breeds - did not constitute any serious problem for the Egyptians. In the following photos you can see the channels, presumably made by the tubular drilling method.

Most of the granite doorways in the Temple of the Valley near the Sphinx show tubular drill channels. The blue circles on the plan to the right show the location of the holes in the temple. During the construction of the temple, the holes were used, apparently, to fasten door hinges when hanging doors.

In the next pictures, you can see something even more impressive - a channel with a diameter of about 18 cm, obtained in granite using a tubular drill. The thickness of the cutting edge of the tool is striking. It is incredible that it was copper - given the thickness of the end wall of the tubular drill and the expected force applied to its cutting edge, it should be an alloy of incredible strength (the picture shows one of the channels that opened when a granite block was split in Karnak).

Probably, purely theoretically, in the very presence of holes of this type there is nothing incredibly incredible, which could not have been received by the ancient Egyptians with a great desire. However, drilling holes in granite is a tricky business. Tubular drilling is a highly specialized method that will not evolve unless there is a real need for large diameter holes in hard rock. These holes demonstrate a high level of technology, developed by the Egyptians, apparently, not for "hanging doors", but already quite established and advanced by that time level, which would have required at least several centuries for its development and preliminary experience of application.