This would raise other problems of manufacture. There would need to be a near-perfect geometric design that was applied to both the cornice and the cowl. It is not surprising to find, therefore, the ancient Egyptians use of an ellipse as seen in figure 7.9 and sections of ellipses in figure 7.10.
Figure 7.10. Hathor’s capital assembly
However, I am not sure if Hathor’s cowl is truly an ellipse. A circle viewed on an angle will appear as an ellipse. Similarly, an ellipse viewed on an angle may appear to be an ellipse with a different aspect ratio, or even a circle. Perhaps in the fullness of time answers to these puzzling questions will come. What we leave the capital with, though, is an understanding of the possible engineering and manufacturing that had to have been expended to bring Hathor to life in the Great Hypostyle Hall at Denderah.
Considering the columns’ height, examining one capital to determine its geometry and precision reveals a quality of work that is surprisingly accurate for an architectural element constructed more than three thousand years ago. After seeing the Ramses sculptures at Luxor, however, should we be surprised? At Luxor, though, we were examining statues, and not the placement of architectural elements inside a building. The real test of a builder’s skill is not just the crafting of a precise column, but the placement of that column in relationship to other columns.
Plate 16 is a photograph taken at the center of four columns. The image was aligned with horizontal and vertical lines drawn in the CAD program, and the lines were positioned over key features. The straight and flat surfaces have green lines, the inner cornice/cowl intersections have red lines, and the outer cornice/cowl intersections have blue lines. Also drawn were green lines touching the V-shaped grooves that were cut along the length of the tresses and which distinguished one side from the other. The bottoms of the tresses approximate ellipses to a degree of accuracy that eliminates chance and that reinforces the geometry seen at Luxor and Karnak in the White Crowns. In plate 16, four magnified insets of the cornice/cowl intersection give a better view of the location of the intersection in relationship to the crossed lines.
I have some experience on a smaller scale with assembling to exacting specifications precisely crafted objects with unusual geometries, thus what my camera revealed in plate 16 gave me a new level of respect for the ancient Egyptians’ manufacturing and assembly abilities. To understand the significance of what this arrangement of four columns represents, we can study figure 7.11.
The cornice/cowl intersection is a point in three-dimensional space that is created where three surfaces come together. In order for the condition seen in plate 16 to exist, the ancient Egyptians crafted identical capitals with precision, and then, maintaining similar precision, they mounted them on top of each column—the surface of which was perfectly flat and of the same elevation—with minuscule variation, column to column.
The point where the cornice and cowl meet, have to be accurately manufactured to dimension A and dimension B, as seen in figure 7.11. The cornice/cowl intersection points provide the most powerful evidence with respect to a possible method. Seen from below, these points are barely noticeable, and I doubt whether anyone would give it any attention if it varied one side to the other or if one capital was rotated so as to throw off the alignment slightly. It is quite possible that those who crafted the columns were not interested in this point, but that their tools were such that precision was copied from capital to capital, replicating the same geometry each time. It is astounding that even with precision crafted into the capitals and each one lined up for installation that the builders were able to position them with such accuracy. This surely has to be one of the most incredible accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians.
Figure 7.11. The capital’s necessary precision
Taking the study one step further, I analyzed six columns and illustrate their alignment in plate 17. Again, red and blue lines cross their own color at the cornice/cowl intersection, connecting each capital and column with orthogonal perfection.
Before we move away from the columns in the Great Hypostyle Hall, there is another feature associated with Hathor to which we should pay closer attention. Statues of Hathor usually depict her with bovine ears. Hathor was often depicted as a full cow with the sun disk between her horns or as a slender woman wearing horns and a sun disk headdress. Hathor in the Great Hypostyle Hall at Denderah is seen with cow ears, and it is the location of the ears that gives us some indication of the geometric replication of the capitals.
Figure 7.12. Hathor’s ears
At first glance, the ears do not seem to be part of an exact geometric design. Looking at an ear, what we see is a feature that looks as though it was scooped out of the rock with a chisel. Figure 7.12, however, seems to tell us something different: these features were not the result of a sculptor’s chisel, which might have been concerned with only one ear at a time, or even a team of sculptors who were each working on a separate ear.
From a distance that exceeds 20 feet, the ears on the outer capitals are in alignment with each other. These are three-dimensional contoured features, not flat surfaces with a simple radius that are crafted into other three-dimensional surfaces. Figure 7.12 speaks to the accuracy of the cowl into which the ears are cut and the replication of the ear geometry.
I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to come to terms with how the temple was assembled. As I think of this structure in the comfort of my study, it appears in my mind as a highly complex assembly of precision parts. Even the reliefs on the architraves appear to conform to a particular pattern. Though there are variations between the anthropomorphic reliefs depicted in figure 7.13, their overall shape and dimension is remarkably similar.
These images are just a small example of the vast array of images that cover every square inch of the inside of the temple. There seems to be strong evidence to support the view that the walls were carved after the blocks were placed. The ceiling, however, seems to be a different matter. Each of the ceiling blocks is perfectly fitted against the others. Even after millennia, the blocks do not show signs of drifting apart.
It would seem that to cut the reliefs on the ceiling would be much more easily accomplished on the ground than after the blocks were put in place. If this was done, however, it would have been an incredible accomplishment to match the reliefs from one block to another, and such perfection would certainly support more the point of view that the carvings were made after the blocks were put in place. Yet there are two blocks in the ceiling that seem to support the idea of the ceiling blocks being installed fully finished: Intricate carving and precise surfaces were ready to meet another ceiling block. Perhaps the blocks were finished along the joint surfaces, and then, with the ceiling surface turned up, the reliefs were applied. Yet even this scenario does not quite explain a very subtle but significant difference in the way the shape of a dog’s legs flows from one ceiling block to the other.
It appears in figure 7.14 that the carving of Anubis on the left was performed while the blocks were separate. The clear demarcation of the split line interrupts the natural form of the left leg, as seen in Anubis on the right, and there is a clear discontinuity along the neck.
While visiting the temple in November 2008, I had a further discussion with Arlan Andrews about the possibility that the Temple of Denderah was carved before being assembled. The topic came up when he was pondering how the reliefs were carved on the walls in the stairways to the roof. These stairways are very narrow, and the walls on both sides are intricately carved with reliefs. The blocks that comprise the walls are fitted with an exactness similar to that found on the casing stones of the Great Pyramid. As figure 7.15 illustrates, the joint is noticeable only because of the leaching of salts between the surfaces. This is common throughout the entire temple and is the only reason we are able to see the finely fitted joints on the capitals in the Great Hypostyle Hall.
Figure 7.13. Two reliefs of the goddess Sekhmet on the architraves
Dr. Andr
ews suggested that the wall’s stones must have been carved before being placed because of the enormous constraints that the artisans would have been faced with in this dark cramped space. Considering the evidence found on the ceiling, the idea makes sense. It also adds to the picture that is already taking shape of a culture that was using methods that we have so far not clearly identified.
Considering the level of perfection that is seen in the rest of the ceiling blocks and walls, if indeed they were carved before being put into place, the Egyptians accomplished an amazing feat of craftsmanship and engineering. Regardless of which side you come out on in the argument, along with all the other wonders at Denderah, it should surely elevate this temple to the status of Wonder of the Ancient World.
Figure 7.14. Figures of Anubis carved in the ceiling blocks
Figure 7.15. The stairway at Denderah
While driving back to Luxor on Sunday in May 2006, Judd and I were treated to a sight similar to the one Amelia Edwards described on her journey up the Nile to visit the holy man Sheik Selîm:
“Do you see Sheik Selîm?” cries Talhamy breathlessly, rushing up from below. “There he is! Look at him! That is Sheik Selîm!”
And so we find out that it is not a monkey but a man—and not only a man, but a saint. Holiest of the holy, dirtiest of the dirty, white-pated, white-bearded, withered, bent, and knotted up, is the renowned Sheik Selîm—he who, naked and unwashed, has sat on that same spot every day through summer heat and winter cold for the last fifty years; never providing himself with food or water; never even lifting his hand to his mouth; depending on charity not only for his food but for his feeding! He is not nice to look at, even by this dim light, and at this distance; but the sailors think him quite beautiful, and call aloud to him for his blessing as we go by.3
Today, our Sheik Selîm was not a stationary broken-down man, but a gentleman of stature with a determined stride and an equally determined nakedness. He was walking down the middle of the road with the indifference and gait of a camel: a haughty stare toward his destination with no mind for yapping dogs or playful children. While tourists—other than myself and my distinguished fellow traveler, of course—gawked, the local inhabitants paid little attention. It is customary in Egypt to give “unusual” characters a wide berth, which is why William Flinders Petrie performed his triangulations on the Giza Plateau dressed only in pink underwear and positioned under a large umbrella. To the Victorian tourist of his day, the sight was enough for them to give him a wide berth.
The world has changed drastically since the time of the building of the temple of Denderah, both in attitudes and technology. The methods the Egyptians used described in textbooks and academic journals, however, have changed little since Petrie’s day. In the next chapter I discuss these methods to see if there has been any progress regarding recognizing the ancient Egyptians’ true capabilities. Has it progressed over the past one hundred thirty year period since Petrie became the father of British Egyptology?
8
Sticks and Stones: Tools of the Trade
Quarrymen of the Pyramid age would have accused Greek historian Strabo of understatement as they hacked at the stubborn granite of Aswan. Their axes and chisels were made of copper hardened by hammering.
DR. I. E. S. EDWARDS, EGYPTOLOGIST1
When Sir William Flinders Petrie presented his discoveries to the Royal Society in London, if he had been asked about a hard drive, he probably would have mentioned the London-to-Brighton run, which was to take place for the first time on Saturday, November 14, 1896. At the start of this memorable drive, a red flag was symbolically destroyed as the speed limit was increased from four miles per hour to fourteen miles per hour, which made redundant the man who was required to walk in front of a motor vehicle holding a red flag as a warning to pedestrians. Petrie was born in 1853 as the second Industrial Revolution began to pick up steam. Trains, ships, and factories increased their pace. Computers were not even a dream at the time, and the first working, efficient internal combustion engine was one year away from being patented in 1854 by the Italians Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci.
Since that era, creativity and invention has propelled us through time to the present, when electrons move letters faster than the post office ever thought possible and pink underwear on the Giza Plateau, such as the kind Petrie wore to keep away tourists, may not be considered as unusual as it used to be. In the one hundred thirty years since Petrie published his seminal studies of the pyramids and temples of Egypt, the hand tools and building and sculpting tools used by men and women have improved exponentially in capability and efficiency and hard drives are better known as integral devices in a computer.
Figure 8.1. The Cairo Museum
Yet we are taught that during the three thousand years that the ancient Egyptians flourished on this planet, the tools used by men and women did not change. How could this be? The finely crafted and precise boxes inside the pyramids at Giza were supposedly created in the fourth dynasty, 2500 BCE, or forty-five hundred years ago. The finely crafted and precise boxes inside the rock tunnels of the Serapeum were supposedly created in the eighteenth dynasty, 1550–1200 BCE, or thirty-five hundred years ago. We are asked to believe that in a one-thousand-year span, the ancient Egyptians did not make any significant improvement in their tools and methods for cutting hard igneous rock. We, however, have examined the results of their labor, and it is clear that the Egyptians were not stupid people. In fact, they were geniuses in their accomplishments, yet we are to accept that while they tapped into the awesome power of the human spirit and creativity, they did not ask, over the course of a full millennium, how they could do their job better—how they could demand less pain and strain from their workforce, how they could do more with less effort, how they could reduce injuries and provide workers with more time off. If there is any mystery to ancient Egypt, it is why a paradigm that was established one hundred thirty years ago still holds force among many Egyptologists and archaeologists.
The ancient Egyptian toolbox, we are told, contained simple tools made of materials that can be found in nature without further development or processing. These tools can be found in the Cairo Museum and the Luxor Museum as well as lying around the quarry at Aswan:
Wooden squares
Wooden plumb bobs
Wooden bows for bow drills
Wooden sledges, or sleds, for hauling
Wooden pry bars for levering heavy weights
Wooden handles for axes
Wooden hammers or mallets
Copper chisels
Copper saws
Copper tubular drills
Copper adzes
Stone dolerite pounders or hammers
Stone chisels
Stone axes
Figure 8.2. Tool case in the Cairo Museum
In 1986, when I visited the Cairo Museum, I asked a friendly Egyptologist guide how the pyramids were built. He led me to two cases where a collection of copper implements were housed. In it were several copper chisels and other assorted implements. After having spent three days exploring the plateau and going through each of the pyramids more than once, I stared at the case in disbelief. How could these paltry primitive tools be responsible for such an engineering accomplishment? It just didn’t seem possible, especially after seeing the enormous amount of granite used in the construction. Yet here a respected Egyptologist insisted that it was so. It turns out that nothing has persuaded Egyptologists to think otherwise in the two decades since that time.
I asked the guide how it was possible that a soft metal such as copper could cut hard stone—particularly granite. His answer was to guide me to a travel agent through whom I could buy plane tickets to Aswan, where, he said, I could see how the granite was quarried. He explained that slots were cut into the granite, and then wood was inserted into the slots and soaked with water. After the wood swelled, the hydraulic pressure caused the granite to split. It was then dragged out of the quarry on sleds and transported d
own the Nile River on barges to Cairo and subsequently to the pyramids, where it was fitted into place.
The guide gave me the official understanding of Egyptologists, who have surveyed the accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians and considered what scholars found in the archaeological record, and thereby concluded that they possessed all they needed to explain everything. There was no mystery. Everything was available to explain how all the artifacts from that period were crafted. The chisels in the cases were there, so obviously they played a part. At the Aswan quarries there were dolerite balls lying around—so they obviously played a part—and tombs were found with carpenter’s instruments in them, so obviously they played a part as well.
Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs Page 18
