Taking my six Wonders of Ancient Egypt in order of importance and applying their historical dates, it would appear that proficiency and skill spanned the entire timeline from the building of the Great Pyramid in the fourth dynasty to the crafting of the boxes in the Serapeum in the eighteenth dynasty, more than two thousand years later. The flat surfaces and square corners measured on the inside of the sarcophagus in Khafre’s pyramid, for instance, are no different from the flat surfaces and square corners inside the boxes in the Serapeum. What distinguishes the two kinds of boxes is their size. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that either the ancient Egyptians had developed a high level of precision early in their history and carried it forward through to the time of the Greeks and Romans or, as discussed in chapter 5, the provenance of the site is so clouded with confusion that the dating of the granite boxes is affected by evidence left behind by later cultures. These giant boxes, for which there are no dating methods, may have resided in the tunnels for millennia—and without any inscription from the Ptolemaic period describing how the boxes were quarried, moved, and crafted to such a high order of precision; or evidence of tools and metrology instruments that reflect such precision; or machines that must have been used to create them, it is more than likely that they were created close to the same time as the pyramids, which also may have an earlier date of construction.
If I consider all the evidence within the same engineering context without regard to the time each example was built, I am compelled to suggest that the ancient Egyptians had to have used sophisticated machines that cut diorite and granite with little difficulty. The evidence suggests that they had lathes and that the lathes were built with precise bearings that regulated the rotation of the spindle. The contoured blocks on the Giza Plateau suggest that they had machines that cut exact, three-dimensional shapes on three axes.
The telltale marks on a Ramses head at Karnak and the indentation above the eyebrow suggest that a rectangular tool was directed along a precise path while oscillating at high frequency, like a jack hammer, against the surface. When the tool came to the eyebrow, it paused briefly, but the oscillations did not cease, and the tool cut deeper where it rested. Such signs are signatures of machining and are well-known consequences of allowing a tool to rest along its path while the cutting force is still applied. (This could be a lathe, for which the tool movement may stop but the work piece keeps rotating; or it could be a milling machine, for which the axes stop moving but the end mill continues turning.) Any machinist would recognize these marks.
The accidental grooves found in the statue of Amun and Mut in the Luxor Museum are proof of tools that do not exist in the archaeological record. These grooves provide evidence of rotary grinding wheels that were used to cut the fine details on the statues.
How were these tools guided? How was the symmetry of the Ramses statues created? The tool marks plus the three-dimensional accuracy present clear evidence that only a precisely guided tool could produce these statues, and further, that the human hand cannot guide a tool with such precision. Today, we would use computer numerical controlled (CNC) machines. Fifty years ago, we would have created a model and controlled the movement of the machine with a stylus that followed the contours of the model. What technology was available to the ancient Egyptians?
It is significant to note that, excluding the boxes in the Serapeum and the interiors of the coffers in Kufu’s and Khafre’s pyramids, some of the precise artifacts I have studied and include in this book were not finished to a high level of polish. Nor do they have the striations caused by a rough abrasive that could have been used to achieve the exact geometries they demonstrate. Creating a surface to precise geometry, whether the geometry is flat-line or circular, if performed by hand work, would require spot finishing—that is, attending to areas that require the discreet removal of material to achieve their final, precise shape. It is surprising, therefore, to find surfaces that are finished to within 0.001 inch (0.0254 millimeter) that do not exhibit any signs of polish at all. Having produced precision surfaces by hand finishing and with machine-guided tools, when I examine surfaces created by the ancient Egyptians, it is clear to me that machines were involved in their creation.
Finally, there is the important question of precision. Chiseling and hand polishing a surface that compares to a surface produced by a modern machine when the object’s purpose is to serve as an architectural element above a doorway, for example, does not make sense. It is completely unnecessary for the function it fills. The architectural elements found near the Valley Temple on the Giza Plateau and at the Temple of Denderah and other temples, however, were crafted by precise machine tools that produced precise products requiring no secondary finishing.
World History
