Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs

by Christopher Dunn

  Lehner points out that scenes in Egyptian tombs indicate that workers are sanding and tapping out details of a statue using stone chisels and refers to drawings in the tomb of Rekh-mi-r, who was a governor of Thebes during the reigns of Tuthmosis III and his son Amenophis II. His lavishly illustrated tomb contains many scenes of the craftsmen he oversaw, including sculptors depicted in figure 9.7. Illustrations such as these are used by Lehner and other Egyptologists as proof that the methods suggested by tomb drawings were the ones used to craft colossal statues and obelisks, with their deep sunken reliefs.

  Figure 9.7. Depiction of a statue being worked on in the tomb of Rekh-mi-r at Thebes. Drawing by C. Dunn, adapted from http://histor­y.memphis.edu/hy­postyle/Tour/build­ing5.htm, with Ramses likeness added.

  To his credit, Lehner admits that his efforts fell short of the quality of the ancient work on the simplest of shapes: the symbol for Ra, or the sun. His efforts produced a very shallow and rough relief compared to the original smooth, perfect profiles that are incised almost 1 inch deep. If he had managed to sink a perfectly formed falcon with narrow cuts of 0.14 inch wide, he might be able to argue that what is seen in figure 9.7 is an accurate representation of how the ancient Egyptians may have performed such intricate carvings.

  Yet lacking replication of the more difficult accomplishments of the ancient Egyptians using such methods, the tomb drawing does not explain the Ramses statues, and we cannot help but wonder what knowledge the artists in Rekh-mi-r’s tomb possessed about how the Ramses colossi were actually made. Was Rekh-mi-r a prolific theorist in his day, and are these drawings mere speculations on how these colossal statues were created? Or is it possible that they describe how workers cleaned the statue and that what has been interpreted to be stonework tools may merely be sponges or sticks for cleaning out the corners? Either way, the evidence of the tomb drawings is hearsay, and the question remains regarding the correctness of connecting them to the hard evidence on the ground, which we cannot replicate when we use these tomb drawings for guidance.

  Regardless of the ideas that are offered to explain how an object can be created, what counts are the results and how closely the results produced using those theories as guidelines conform, in this case, to the results produced by the ancient Egyptians. What results would we look for, then, to prove that the methods used by the ancient Egyptians to quarry, shape, sculpt, move, and erect a 400-ton obelisk have been demonstrated?

  Lehner arguably does not prove methods in his obelisk documentary. For starters, the obelisk he uses is only 40 tons, and the reliefs that the cuts are not even close to the quality of the ancient reliefs. Another Egyptologist who was a part of Lehner’s team, Denys Stocks, omits from his report a complete engineering description of the original artifact and clear photographic evidence of the artifacts that he attempts to replicate to prove his point. Although Stocks shows that he could chisel an ankh into soft limestone with a copper chisel, in his book Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology, he neglects to thoroughly describe the ancient Egyptian reliefs so that readers can compare his results with the originals. Also, his experiment in drilling granite using a copper tube neglects to describe the tool marks of ancient core drilling, as discussed by Petrie. We will address this topic in greater detail in the next chapter.4

  Lehner mentions that having a rapport with the stone would bring greater success. This has a nice ring to it, because artists do connect with the materials they work with and seem to develop an inner knowledge of how the material will respond to their touch. This quality of work is not necessarily quantifiable in a scientific sense, but rather is a unique gift that artists and sculptors possess. It was important for me, therefore, to seek the opinion of a modern sculptor who had gained a rapport with the material he has worked with over many years and who has produced significant works of art. I contacted Mike Leckie, a modern sculptor who has crafted many kinds of marbles, limestone, alabaster, and other rocks into incredibly beautiful shapes. His website presents photographic evidence of and commentary on the stages of creating a statue in marble. Figures 9.8 and 9.9 are photographs of a finished work that can be seen in progress at www.mikelec­kie.com/in-progress-m­arble.html and are reproduced here with his kind permission.

  Figure 9.8. Mike Leckie’s Bather in Marble, front

  Figure 9.9. Mike Leckie’s Bather in Marble, back

  I was anxious to get Mr. Leckie’s opinion on the Ramses statues at Luxor, and I forwarded to him my text that addresses those incredible works. In response, Mr. Leckie wrote to me his expert opinion on these immense accomplishments of art and engineering:

  March 18, 2009

  Dear Chris,

  Thank you for this opportunity, I have been interested in Egypt and its sculpture since I was a child.

  As a stone sculptor, I can say that the granite of the Ramses head and figures is an extremely hard stone, and I believe tools much more durable than hardened copper chisels must have been used in the carving process. It would be necessary for me to upgrade my normal tools to carve such granite. My modern diamond blades and grinding points would be worn out before the head was started. The ancient carvers must have had advanced technology.

  Although the ancient Egyptians had stone chisels and hammers, which could cut the extremely hard granite, even with an army of disposable labor, completing four large sculptures exactly alike with hand tools would take more time than we can conceive of as possible. Modern man with all his modern tools would be challenged to finish one Ramses in a generous timeline. Creating four of them as large as they are, all the same, seems almost impossible.

  Best regards,

  Mike Leckie

  www.mikeleckie.com

  From the time of Greeks until modern times, sculptors have preferred to work in stone other than granite, though with the rise of modern steel tools and materials, granite has been used on occasion.

  The documentary produced by Lehner et al. is an interesting study that purported to demonstrate how the ancient Egyptians were able to quarry, shape, and incise deep reliefs into obelisks, transport the obelisks over many miles, and then pivot them into a vertical position on a pedestal within or in front of a temple or other important building. It is important to note that the documentary’s results fail in every way to demonstrate the more difficult aspects of the work. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable study, thanks in part to the irreverent good humor of stonemason Roger Hopkins.

  During the making of the obelisk documentaries, which were broadcast by PBS’s Nova in 1999 and 2001, Peter Tyson, the online producer for Nova, went to Hamada Rashwan’s quarry, which had been contracted to provide the Nova team with an obelisk for their experiment. There, Tyson interviewed Rashwan, an engineer and the owner of the granite quarry, which also provides some labor for the experiment. Rashwan has been in the quarrying business for twenty-nine years. Tyson asks him if he has learned anything from his ancestors about quarrying and moving granite. Significantly, this man who has been around the quarrying of Aswan granite for a lifetime, replies: “Yes, of course, because as you know, all the ancient Egyptian obelisks were produced in this area, the Unfinished Obelisk area. I don’t think the ancient Egyptians used people, the workers, to raise obelisks. They used very advanced engineering techniques. I think that is the true way.”5

  Considering the difficulty and effort involved in moving obelisks from Egypt to Rome or London or New York, we might well ask why the Romans, English, French, and Americans didn’t go to their own quarries and, with their modern iron tools, simply create obelisks of their own? Certainly, they wouldn’t have had to move them as far, and the risks involved in seafaring would not be an issue. The answer to this question is better understood after a trip to the Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan, where the Nova team, following in the footsteps of other researchers, tries their hand at quarrying a 9-ton obelisk near to where the original 1,200-ton mass rests, as it has for millennia, still attached to the bedrock.

  Roger Hopkins is tasked with c
arving out an obelisk using the tools that Egyptologists maintain the ancient Egyptians used. For quarrying, they theorize that dolerite pounders—dolerite is a very hard, greenish rock—were wielded by hand and bashed against the granite. The balls are 5 to 12 inches in diameter and weigh an average of 12 pounds (see figure 9.10). As Hopkins works away at his task, Mark Lehner demonstrates how he believes the ancient Egyptians worked the granite in the tight confines of a deep trench that is only 26 inches wide at its widest point. As his workers scrape the bottom of the trench with their dolerite pounders, they respectfully avoid removing any of the granite.

  Hopkins has been at the task for seven days when Lehner approaches him to view his progress. Lehner is not impressed, to say the least, for Hopkins had made very little headway, but proposed that he speed things up using more modern techniques.

  This is not the first time Hopkins has been involved with Lehner and has had to call in modern tools when running into difficulty with supposedly ancient methods. Nova’s “This Old Pyramid” documentary had similarly run into difficulties using “ancient” techniques in the creation of a small pyramid. Lehner and Hopkins had to resort to steel tools and heavy machinery to lift most of the blocks that went into it.

  There is some confusion regarding the exact amount of material removed in an hour in Hopkins’s and Lehner’s experiment. At one point, Lehner mentions that in two to three hours, 2 millimeters had been removed from a small square patch, presumably one quarter of the size of the patch assigned to a worker in the trench. If we calculate the amount of material removed per hour in the Hopkins and Lehner efforts, we learn the following:

  Figure 9.10. Dolerite ball at the Unfinished Obelisk (Photograph courtesy of Dan Hamilton, 2004)

  LEHNER AND HOPKINS

  Width of square 12 inches 30.48 centimeters

  Depth of square 0.078 inch 0.2 centimeter

  Hours worked 2.5 2.5

  Cubic mass/hr removed* 4.493 74.322

  Weight of granite/cubic measure† 0.097 lb 0.0027 kg

  Total weight of granite removed 0.436 lb 0.201 kg

  *The calculation used to determine cubic mass per hour is (width × width × depth) ÷ 2.5.

  †Weight of granite = 168 lb/cu.ft; 2691 kg/cu.m

  While at Hamada Rashwan’s quarry, Nova producer Peter Tyson also tries his hand at quarrying with a dolerite pounder.

  I got a nasty taste of their job—minus the cramped space and the pressure to succeed. Cupping a greenish-black dolerite ball in my hands, I brought it down with a crack onto a block of granite. Over and over, I bounced it on the same spot, till I thought I’d scrape the skin off my palms. After ten minutes, my wrists hurt from trying to guide the 12-pound rock in at an angle—the better to break the granite—and stabs of pain began shooting up my arms. Mark Lehner recalled that after once pounding for several hours, he could barely type on a computer: (“All I wanted to do was smash the keys,” he said.) I did it for only 20 minutes, and all I had to show for it was a baby’s palmful of granite dust. And the granite’s surface looked no different than when I’d started.6

  Three baby’s palms filled with granite dust after one hour of pounding would be somewhat dispiriting. Nonetheless, my own efforts were no more successful when I attempted the same thing in 2006. The midday sun beat down unmercifully as I walked along the meandering granite path around the Unfinished Obelisk, an ancient relic that had seen the same sunrise a million times since it was abandoned by the quarry-men. The hill was pockmarked with the remains of ancient slots that were cut by masons in order to split granite blocks from the stone faces. Little is known about the original topography of the site because this quarry had been worked for millennia. Across the length and breadth of Egypt, millions of tons of Aswan granite can be found in the shape of building blocks, architectural elements, statues, and, most prominently, the famous obelisks that pierce the sky like giant punctuation marks, commanding visitors to look upward and know their place and mortality in an ancient and infinite universe.

  I had plenty of water, an Egyptian agal (braided headband), and a keffiyeh (white cotton scarf) thrown to me by merchants in feluccas who had approached our Nile boat the previous evening. The Arabic strains of the soulful singing of Oum Kalthoum from our Arabian Nights evening had faded in my head, to be replaced by Noel Coward’s famous lampoon of British colonial mentality, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun.” I searched indigenous faces for signs of mirth. There were plenty.

  “What’s your name?” asked a cheeky young boy with a smile on his face and trinkets in his outstretched hand.

  “Christopher.” I replied. “What’s yours?”

  “Mohammed,” he replied. “Welcome to Alaska!” he laughed.

  “Al hamdu lilla” (praise be to God), I replied, soaking my scarf with water and securing it to my head with my agal. I love Egyptian quick-witted humor, and they love foreigners who can join them in making fun of—foreigners—and there’s plenty of fun to be had in Egypt. The scarf blocked the sun, and the slight blowing breeze created a natural air-conditioning effect. It was practical, but not quite a dashing Indiana Jones look.

  As I approached the obelisk, which is still attached to the bedrock against the granite hillside, I remembered when I first visited in 1986, upon the advice of an Egyptologist in the Cairo Museum. Twenty years later, I noticed that the site had changed drastically. Instead of ascending a staircase straight up to the middle of the obelisk, a path with occasional steps wound around what would have been the pyramidion that crowns the traditional obelisk. Though money changed hands, there were no tickets sold in 1986, so there was no reception area, ticket booth, or gate to pass through, as there are today. Also missing back then were the ubiquitous guards that are now posted with rifles at every high point in the vicinity—a necessity given the existence of terrorists striving to kill tourists in order to destabilize the government. Of course, in 1986 there were few tourists, but in 2006 they flock to the site daily. In 1986, the only vehicle in the vicinity was the taxi that drove us to the site, and I had the entire quarry to myself.

  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. I was not the first to realize the significance of the Unfinished Obelisk’s sober challenge to theories about the methods employed by the ancient Egyptians in quarrying and shaping granite. The value of this artifact is that it provides an important contribution to the complete story of how obelisks were made—from the raw bedrock to the finished items that proudly stood in prolific number throughout Egypt.

  Lehner, Hopkins, and I (independently and separately) came to the Unfinished Obelisk sixty-five to seventy-five years after it was first revealed to the modern world in its full glory. Between 1921 and 1922, Reginald Engelbach (1888–1946), the chief inspector of antiquities in Upper Egypt, undertook the task of having the rubble cleared from the trench that surrounds the obelisk, and, in 1923, he wrote an exhaustive study titled The Problem of the Obelisks:

  Before the clearance, all the visitor could see of the obelisk was the top surface of the pyramidion and about 20 yards of shaft, which sloped down into a vast heap of sand, chips and granite boulders. It has now become one of the most visited sights in Aswan, since nothing of its kind is to be seen elsewhere.

  Most persons, having seen the temples and tombs of Egypt, become more or less blasé to them. This is largely due to the fact that no-one—least of all the dragomans [guide or interpreter]—brings home to them the enormous difficulties the Egyptians overcame. They dismiss them as beyond their understanding, and many closer students of the monuments than the average visitor have boldly affirmed that the Egyptians knew engines and forces of nature of which we are to-day ignorant. This is quite a wrong idea; it is, as a matter of fact, far easier to explain every step in the mechanics of a large obelisk to the
non-technical reader than those of an iron bridge. Though modern research robs the Egyptians of the magical powers attributed to them, it makes them more admirable in the eyes of the practical man, as it shows that they could do, with the most primitive tools, feats of engineering which we, with some 3,000 years of mechanical progress behind us, are barely able to copy.7

  Engelbach’s Measurements of the Obelisk

  Length: 137 feet

  Base: 13 feet 9 inches

  Pyramidion base: 8 feet 2 inches

  Pyramidion height: 14 feet 2 inches

  Weight (if it had been extracted): 1,168 tons8

  Little seems to have changed since Engelbach’s time. Alternative ideas were expressed about the Egyptian monuments even in the 1920s and were summarily dismissed in much the same way as they are today. Yet in a discussion with an Egyptologist with the Department of Tourism in 2004, I was told that every time she accompanies engineers around the Unfinished Obelisk, they dismiss the official theory as unworkable and start discussing how it really could have been accomplished. This may be considered hearsay, or worse—thought of as pandering—but it rings true to me, for I too have been in the company of engineers who are of the same mind and engineers are not known for pandering, especially toward other engineers. If everybody knew of Engelbach’s work and his opinion of such speculations, would these types of conversations still take place? They most certainly would.