ere’s some truly astonishing work within the Cairo museum and I along with countless others have to ask what type of technology would be needed for such precision within ancient Egypt thousands of years ago.?

Most people know of the great construction achievements of the dynastic Egyptians such as the pyramids and temples of the Giza Plateau area as well as the Sphinx. Many books and videos show depictions of vast work forces hewing blocks of stone in the hot desert sun and carefully setting them into place. However, some of these amazing works could simply not have been made by these people during the time frame that we call dynastic Egypt.

Up until the 7th century BC there was very little iron present in Egypt, as this material only became commonly used once the Assyrians invaded at that time; in fact, the ancient Egyptians regarded iron as an impure metal associated with Seth, the spirit of evil who according to Egyptian tradition governed the central deserts of Africa. A few examples of meteoric iron have been found which predate the Assyrians, but this consists largely of small ornamental beads.

Stone sculpture of Horus in Egypt. Source: Public Domain

The very basic problem that arises is that we find at many of the ancient sites in Egypt finely crafted works in basalt, granite, quartzite and diorite which are very hard stones that can’t be shaped efficiently even by hardened iron tools. For most of the history of Egypt, the tools used to shape stone consisted of hardened bronze, which is much softer than iron. In this article, we will see examples of ancient hard stone workmanship which simply could not have been created during the dynastic Egyptian time frame of about 2500 to 1500 BC, when most academics believe they were made. Only a few examples will be discussed, and far more can be seen and read about in my Lost Ancient Technology Of Egypt book.

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Using common tools to work stone in ancient Egypt. ( Egyptraveluxe Tours)

A Famous Unfinished Obelisk

We start in Aswan, which is close to the border of Sudan, and it is here that we find the famous unfinished obelisk, and another smaller one, still attached to the granite bedrock.

The large unfinished obelisk in the Aswan quarry. (Author provided)

Archaeologists claim the female ruler known as Hatshepsut, who came to the throne in 1478 BC sanctioned the construction of the bigger of the two. It is nearly one third larger than any ancient Egyptian obelisk ever erected. If finished, it would have measured around 42 m (approximately 137 feet) and would have weighed nearly 1,200 tons. The greatest questions that arise are: what tools could have been used to shape this massive stone monument, and how were the Egyptians planning on raising it out of the pit in which it sits, taking into account its immense size. To the former, most Egyptologists believe that round and hand-held stone dolerite pounders were the main tools being used.

In basic terms, any tool should have a greater hardness than the material being cut or shaped. The pink granite of which the unfinished obelisk is composed has a Mohs hardness that sits between the scale of 6 and 7, (the maximum being diamond at 10) and thus is more or less the same hardness as dolerite, making the latter a poor material for shaping the former. And bronze, the other tool substance known to and used by the ancient Egyptians is much softer, being on average 3.5 on the Mohs scale.

Dolorite pounders on top of a piece of pink Aswan granite. (Author provided)

Other problems encountered at the unfinished obelisk is that there is very little room inside the trench to be able to create a hard blow, and such repeated efforts could also break the dolerite tool. According to engineer and expert machinist Christopher Dunn, author of Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs:

‘The unfinished obelisk offers compelling indirect evidence regarding the level of technology its creators had reached – not so much by indicating clearly what methods were used, but by the overpowering indications of what methods could not have been used.’

What Tool Did the Shaping?

The idea that hand held pounders were responsible for the shaping of the unfinished obelisk has to be dismissed, and yet, what kind of technology could possibly have been responsible? Chris Dunn’s opinion is that if one observes the pattern left by the tool which did the actual shaping, especially in the walls of the trenches that surround the unfinished obelisk, there is an even pattern which would unlikely have occurred if hand tools such as the pounders were used. According to Chris:

‘The horizontal striations are typical in cutting when the feed of a tool that is removing material pauses along its path, withdrawn to remove waste, and the interruption of the tool leaves a mark on the surface. Also, it could be that as the tool was rocked back and forth against the walls of the trench to clear the waste on the vertical wall, horizontal striations appeared where the tool pressed the cutting surface against the side wall to keep the trench from narrowing.’ In other words, some form of technology which the dynastic Egyptians simply did not have. And so this begs the question; if the dynastic Egyptians could not have done this work, and the later Greeks and Romans were not responsible, then who did and when? We have no choice but to entertain the idea that a civilization existed before what we call the pharaohs and in fact had forms of what we would call high technology, and that these people lived in the area prior to 3100 BC.

“Scoop marks” beside the smaller of the two obelisks. (Author provided)

Many will of course ask where the tools are that could have done work such as this. We do know that strange devices and materials have been found in archaeological sites in different parts of the world, and have been labeled, boxed and hidden out of view because they do not fit the conventional historical paradigm. Sir William Flinders Petrie was one of the great Egyptologists of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Petrie found a number of core drills, many of which are now housed in the museum named after him at the University College London in London England. The actual hollow drill bits have not been found, but the cores made of limestone, alabaster, granite and other stones have.

Chris Dunn spent hours in the Petrie museum and was allowed to personally examine some of the drill cores. Here he discusses the characteristics of one of them:

‘The most fascinating feature of the granite core Petrie describes is the spiral groove around the core indicating a feed rate of 0.100 inch per revolution of the drill. It was 500 times greater than modern diamond drills, but the rotation of the drill would not have been as fast as the modern drill’s 900 revolutions per minute.’

Granite drill core in the Petrie Museum. (Author provided)

The often times quoted idea that these drill cores were achieved using a bow and copper tube with sand used as an abrasive must be thrown out, as no modern replication of these cores has been done to the level of efficiency as discussed above.

Making excavations in 1936, in the archaeological zone of Saqqara, Petrie discovered the Tomb of Prince Sabu, who was the son of Pharaoh Adjuib, governor of the I Dynasty (3,000 BC). Between utensils of funeral objects that were extracted, Emery’s attention was powerfully drawn to an object that he initially defined in his report on the Great Tombs of the I Dynasty as: ‘a container in the form of schist bowl.’ Years later, in his previously mentioned work, Archaic Egypt, he commented on the object with a word that perfectly summarizes the reality of the situation and the discomfort the object causes; ” cachibache” (a small hole that threatens to become a much larger hole.)

According to the typical and expected view of the archaeologists and Egyptologists, this object is no more than a tray or the pedestal of some candelabrum, with a design a product of blind chance. I am personally quite amazed that such a controversial piece is still on display in the Cairo museum, and wonder what even odder objects are hidden away in their warehouses.

The famous schist bowl or disk. (Author provided)

At Karnak, which is a huge temple complex, we find many examples of ancient core drill holes, and one whose diameter is greater than a human hand. As you can see in the photograph the wall of the drill itself was thinner than 21 st century examples, and even engineers and mining experts that have seen it cannot explain what material the drill would have been made of to maintain its shape and stability at being so thin.

Large drill core at Karnak. (Author provided)

Massive Granite Boxes

Another perplexing site is what is called the Serapeum at Saqqara, containing massive granite boxes which many academics believe were created during dynastic times. However, the boxes in the Serapeum are examples of what engineers such as Chris Dunn, I, and members of the Khemit School have major problems with as regards the conventional Egyptologists’ explanations. According to the latter, in the 13th century BC, Khaemweset ordered that a tunnel be excavated through the solid limestone bedrock, with side chambers designed to contain large granite sarcophagi weighing at least 70 tonnes each, to hold the mummified remains of prize Apis bulls.

Mummified Bull at the National Museum of Natural History. (Pccromeo/CC BY SA 3.0)

Manufacturer Chris Dunn is a man who knows what precision surfaces look like, as he has been involved in making complex metal parts for the aviation industry for decades. He has studied the boxes in the Serapeum many times, and has been able to measure the flatness of their granite and limestone surfaces using precise gauges. The following are his thoughts, as found in an article on his website www.gizapower.com:

‘The granite box inside Khafre’s pyramid has the same characteristics as the boxes inside the Serapeum. Yet the boxes in the Serapeum were ascribed to the 18 th dynasty, over 1100 years later when stone working was supposedly in decline. Considering that this dating was based on pottery items that were found and not the boxes themselves, it would be reasonable to speculate that the boxes have not been dated accurately. Their characteristics show that their creators used the same tools and were blessed with the same skill and knowledge as those who created Khafre’s pyramid. Moreover, the boxes in both locations are evidence of a much higher purpose than mere burial sarcophagi. They are finished to a high accuracy; their corners are remarkably square, and their inside corners worked down to a dimension that is sharper than what one would expect to find in an artifact from prehistory. All of these features are extremely difficult to accomplish and none of them necessary for a mere burial box.

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Yousef Awyan feeling the smoothness of the surface. (Author provided)

The manufacturers of these boxes in the Serapeum not only created inside surfaces that were flat when measured vertically and horizontally, they also made sure that the surfaces they were creating were square and parallel to each other, with one surface, the top, having sides that are 5 feet and 10 feet apart from each other. But without such parallelism and squareness of the top surface, the squareness noted on both sides would not exist.

Staggering Implications

While it may be argued that modern man cannot impose a modern perspective on artifacts that are thousands of years old, an appreciation of the level of precision found in these artifacts is lacking in archaeological literature and is only revealed by an understanding what it takes to produce this kind of work. As an engineer and craftsman, who has worked in manufacturing for over 40 years and who has created precision artifacts in our modern world, in my opinion this accomplishment in prehistory deserves more recognition . Nobody does this kind of work unless there is a very high purpose for the artifact. Even the concept of this kind of precision does not occur to an artisan unless there is no other means of accomplishing what the artifact is intended to do. The only other reason that such precision would be created in an object would be that the tools that are used to create it are so precise that they are incapable of producing anything less than precision. With either scenario, we are looking at a higher civilization in prehistory than what is currently accepted. To me, the implications are staggering.

Astonishing precision of one of the Serapeum boxes. (Author provided)

This is why I believe that these artifacts that I have measured in Egypt are the smoking gun that proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that a higher civilization than what we have been taught existed in ancient Egypt. The evidence is cut into the stone.’

What we also have to take into consideration is that most of the boxes in the Serapeum were made of granite, and most likely stone brought from the quarry at Aswan, about 500 miles from Saqqara. Not only that, but the lid of each box was cut from the same stone as the box itself. Why would the makers go to such trouble if bulls, no matter how prized, were the contents? It would appear, as Dunn alluded to, that the Serapeum boxes were not created in the 18th Dynasty and not by the dynastic Egyptians at all, but are remnants of an older and more technologically sophisticated culture, possibly those that are known as the Khemitians.

An unfinished Egyptian obelisk at Aswan with holes showing how the granite would be split. (Glenn Ashton/ CC BY SA 3.0)

What you have seen and read here are but a few of multiple examples of artifacts that do not fit the paradigm of the dynastic Egyptians. These artifacts could not have been created by these people, and thus we must conclude that they are older.  More information can be gleaned from my book Lost Ancient Technology Of Egypt.

Top Image: Grinding stone, Dendera Temple, Egypt. Source: Chris Beckett/CC BY NC ND 2.0

By Brien Foerster