The Giza Power Plant (12 page)

Chapter Four

ADVANCED MACHINING IN ANCIENT EGYPT

I
n August 1984,
Analog
magazine published my article, ''Advanced
Machining in Ancient Egypt?" It was a study of
Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh
by Sir William Flinders Petrie. Since the article's publication, I have visited Egypt twice, and with each visit I leave with more respect for the ancient pyramid builders. While in Egypt in 1986, I visited the Cairo Museum and gave a copy of my article, along with a business card, to the director of the museum. He thanked me kindly, threw it in a drawer to join other sundry material, and turned away. Another Egyptologist led me to the "tool room" to educate me in the methods of the ancient masons by showing me a few cases that housed primitive copper tools. I asked my host about the cutting of granite, for that was the focus of my article. He explained that the ancient Egyptians cut a slot in the granite, inserted wooden wedges, and then soaked them with water. The wood swelled, creating pressure that split the rock. Splitting rock is vastly different than machining it, and he did not explain how copper implements were able to cut granite, but he was so enthusiastic with his dissertation that I did not interrupt. To prove his argument, he walked me over to a nearby travel agent, encouraging me to buy airplane tickets to Aswan, where, he said, the evidence is clear. I must, he insisted, see the quarry marks there, as well as the unfinished obelisk (see Figure 14).

Dutifully, I bought the tickets and arrived at Aswan the next day. (After learning some of the Egyptian customs, I got the impression that this was not the first time that my Egyptologist friend had made that trip to the travel agent.) The quarry marks I saw there did not satisfy me that the methods conventional theorists describe were the only means by which the pyramid builders quarried their rock (see Figure 15). For example, located in the channel
which runs the length of the estimated 3,000-ton obelisk, I saw a large, conical hole drilled into the bedrock hillside that measures approximately twelve inches in diameter and three feet deep. The hole was drilled at an angle, with the top intruding into the channel space (see Figure 16). To my eye, it seemed likely that the ancients might have used drills to remove material from the perimeter of the obelisk, knocked out the webs between the holes, and then removed the cusps.

F
IGURE
14.
Quarry Marks at Aswan

The Aswan quarries
were
educational, although after returning to Cairo the following day and while strolling around the Giza Plateau later in the week, I started to question the quarry marks at Aswan even more. South of the Second Pyramid I found an abundance of quarry marks of similar nature. The granite casing stones that had sheathed the Second Pyramid were stripped off and lying around the base in various stages of destruction. Some of the stones were still in place, though sections had been split away from them, and there I found the same quarry marks that I had seen earlier in the week at Aswan. This was puzzling to me. Disregarding the impossibility of Egyptologists' theories on the ancient pyramid builders' quarrying methods, I wondered if these theories were valid even from a nontechnical, logical viewpoint. If those quarry marks distinctively identify the people who created the pyramids, why would they engage in such a tremendous amount
of extremely difficult work only to destroy the work after having completed it? It seemed to me that the quarry marks at Aswan and on the Giza Plateau were made at a later time and that they were created by people who were interested only in obtaining granite without caring about its source.

FIGURE 15.
Quarry Marks on Khafre's Pyramid Granite

F
IGURE
16.
Drill Hole at Aswan

As I pondered this revelation, I wondered about William Flinders Petrie, who had walked this plateau one hundred years before me. What drove him? What were his private thoughts about his studies that he did not share with the Royal Society or his colleagues? Being a pioneer in the field of Egyptology, his work greatly influenced the archaeological profession. It goes without saying that-archaeology is largely the study of history's toolmakers, and that archaeologists understand a society's level of advancement from its tools and artifacts. The hammer was probably the first tool ever invented, and hammers have forged some elegant and beautiful artifacts. Ever since humans first learned that they could effect profound changes in their environment by applying force with a reasonable degree of accuracy, the development of tools has been a continuous and fascinating aspect of human endeavor. The Great Pyramid, however, leads a long list of artifacts that have been misunderstood and misinterpreted by archaeologists, who have promoted theories and methods about its construction that cannot be explained using the tools they have excavated.

For the most part, archaeologists consider the primitive tools they discover as contemporaneous with the artifacts of the same period. During the pyramid building period in Egyptian history, artifacts were produced in prolific numbers and a great many have survived—but there are precious few tools that survive to explain their creation. Consequently, the ancient Egyptian artifacts cannot be explained in simple terms. What is more, the tools that
have
survived do not fully represent the state of the art that is evident in the artifacts themselves. The tools displayed by Egyptologists as instruments for the creation of many of these incredible artifacts are physically in capable of reproducing them. After standing in awe before these engineering marvels, and then being shown a paltry collection of copper implements in the tool case at the Cairo Museum, I came away bemused and frustrated. In spite of ancient Egypt's most visible and impressive monuments, we have only a sketchy understanding of the full scope of its technology.

Petrie recognized that these tools were insufficient to explain Egyptian
artifacts. He explored this anomaly thoroughly in his book, and he expressed amazement about the methods the ancient Egyptians used to cut hard, igneous rocks. He credited these ancient craftspeople with methods that we are only now beginning to appreciate. So why do modern Egyptologists insist that this work was accomplished with a few primitive copper instruments?

I am not an Egyptologist, I am a technologist. I do not have much interest in who died when, whom they may have taken with them, and where they went. I intend no disrespect for the mountain of work and the millions of hours of study conducted on this subject by intelligent scholars (professional and amateur), but my interest—thus my focus—is elsewhere. When I look at an artifact to investigate how it was manufactured, I am not concerned about its history or chronology. Having spent most of my career working with the machinery that actually creates modern artifacts—such as jet-engine components—I am able to analyze and determine how an artifact was created. I also have had training and experience in various nonconventional manufacturing methods, such as laser processing and electrical discharge machining. Having said this, I should state that, contrary to some popular speculations on the cutting of stone for the pyramids, I have
not
seen evidence of laser cutting on the Egyptian rocks. A variety of people have speculated that to erect a structure as perfect as the Great Pyramid, the builders must have possessed supernatural powers. Some even speculate that the builders used lasers to cut the masonry and then levitated the stones into place in the pyramid. While I cannot speak authoritatively regarding the builders' powers of levitation—whether the implementation of those powers was through the use of the mind or through the use of technology—I can say with reasonable confidence that no lasers were used in cutting the materials that went into building the Great Pyramid. Although the laser is a wonderful tool with many uses, its function as a cutting tool is limited to economically viable applications, such as cutting small holes in thin pieces of metal and refractory material. As a general purpose cutting tool, it cannot compete with the machining methods that were available before its inception.

Still, there
is
evidence for other nonconventional machining methods, as well as more sophisticated, conventional type sawing, lathing, and milling practices. Undoubtedly some of the artifacts that Petrie studied were produced using lathes. There is also evidence of clearly defined lathe tool marks
on some "sarcophagi" lids. The Cairo Museum alone contains evidence—once it is properly analyzed—that is sufficient to prove that the ancient Egyptians used highly sophisticated manufacturing methods. For generations scholars have focused on the nature of the cutting tools used. But while in Egypt in February 1995, I, as a technologist, discovered evidence that raises a perhaps more intriguing question: "What guided those cutting tools?"

The methods used to cut the masonry for the Great Pyramid can be deduced from the marks they left behind on the stone. The bulk of the pyramid was constructed with limestone blocks weighing an average of two-and-one-half tons each. While there are some interesting points to be made concerning the limestone that encased the Great Pyramid, and they will be addressed later, those stones do not offer the same information about the methods that were used to produce them as do the thousands of tons of granite. At the expense of considerable time and effort by the original creators, the granite artifacts found in the Great Pyramid and at other sites in Egypt offer the clues we are seeking.

But before we investigate the granite that was used in the Giza pyramids, we must evaluate several artifacts that almost undeniably indicate machine power was used by the pyramid builders. Those artifacts, scrutinized by Petrie, are all fragments of extremely hard, igneous rock. Those pieces of granite and diorite exhibit marks that are the same as those that result from cutting with modern machinery. It is shocking that Petrie's studies of those 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 submitted evidence showing that the ancient Egyptians not only used lathes, but they performed tasks that would, by today's standards, be considered impossible without highly developed specialized techniques, tasks such as cutting concave and convex spherical radii without splintering the material.