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

by Christopher Dunn

  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.

  WHERE ARE THE MACHINES?

  No machines have been found in the archaeological record to support these assertions, but there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence that leads to such conclusions. Are the machines still intact and lying under the desert sand? Or were they removed completely from the areas? Or could it be that all of this evidence points to an earlier civilization that suffered a cataclysm of such magnitude that much of what existed was destroyed, and what remained was susceptible to erosion, decay, and corrosion, and slowly disappeared over a long period of time? This brings us back to Robert Schoch’s evaluation of the erosion pattern on the Sphinx and the Sphinx enclosure. He claimed that the period of time when sufficient rain fell in Egypt to cause this erosion was seven to nine thousand years ago. Is this sufficient time for ancient machines to turn to dust and blow away? It seems incredible to imagine, but there is reason to suspect that this could have happened.

  Pushing the history of the pyramids back in time is not a new concept. Stephen Mehler, in his book Land of Osiris, refers to his work with Abd’l Hakim Awyan, an Egyptian native who was considered a cultural wisdom keeper and has a lineage that can be traced back to predynastic Egyptians known as Khemitians. (Their homeland was known as Khemit—or KMT, given that ancient Khemitians did not use vowels in their language.) While it is only hearsay passed down through countless generations, the opinions of the elders should be considered, and Hakim’s opinion on the age of the pyramids would have it pushed back even further than what Robert Schoch would support, given the geological evidence. Mehler writes: “When I first heard Hakim speak of the Sphinx in November 1992, he calmly asserted that she was over 52,000 years old.”4

  Stories of an older civilization have long been maintained in the traditions of indigenous peoples, who refer to them as a time when gods ruled the earth. This period in Egyptian lore is generally dismissed by Egyptologists as legend, and those who would propose such ideas, such as Schwaller de Lubicz and others, are considered New Age (in some circles a pejorative label) and are ignored. Yet there is mounting evidence and professional opinion that lead us to consider the old legends and take them more seriously. One example is the opinion of architect Dr. Hossam Abulfotouh, who maintains that the so-called workers’ village of Giza could not have been built by the same artisans who built the pyramids. We are left, therefore, to consider the idea of an older culture that was more gifted in architectural design and execution than has been commonly accepted. There is no question that the Great Pyramid is the most sophisticated and precise of all the structures on the Giza Plateau, and, frankly, of all the buildings in the world.

  If we follow the idea of an older civilization, therefore, the pyramids would have already been there before the first dynasty of the ancient Egyptians. The Great Pyramid was, most likely, the zenith of construction on the plateau, and the other pyramids were likely built before it was. Yet something happened to the culture that built the pyramids, and when Khufu came on the scene, he naturally chose the most impressive structure—the Great Pyramid—as his own, and his heirs took turns in claiming the rest. What event could have brought death and destruction to this ancient civilization that is referred to in Egyptian lore as being inhabited by gods of the First Time?

  As I concluded my research in Egypt, I pondered what might have driven the ancient Egyptians to devote their resources to such enormously difficult tasks, and I wondered how an advanced civilization would react if it had knowledge of impending doom. Perhaps it would turn its genius and industry into leaving a message that would survive the coming cataclysm and provide a technological imprint to say to future generations, “We were here. This is who we are and what we are capable of doing.”

  Modern society builds obsolescence into everything it makes. The ancient Egyptians may have spent their last days on earth building for eternity and preparing for the afterlife. They were obsessed with the afterlife. It was all that mattered to them. Is it not all that matters to us too? If so, then why do we wait until we are faced with our own mortality before giving it any attention? It seems that the continuity of generations provides us with a comforting belief in our immortality: a part of us will live on after we die. We are also comfortable leaving things for the next generation to fix or address. Yet if we knew that there would not be another generation, how would we behave? If we knew that a day was coming when most of life on the planet would cease to exist, what kind of shock would that give our psyche? Earthly matters that normally consume our minds would surely be replaced with thoughts of the afterlife and how we would continue after we die.

  Did the ancient Egyptians have knowledge of an impending catastrophe? Their marvelous spires of granite at Karnak were protected by walls, though we don’t know if those walls were filled with sand or not. Why was it necessary to build a wall around Hatshepsut’s obelisk? Many obelisks were not similarly protected, and some of them had fallen in prehistory. Massive statues, like those of Ramses at the Ramesseum, had toppled over at some time in prehistory. There was an event that devastated this civilization, and there are signs that they knew it was coming.

  Mud brick walls were built around some structures. Some smaller statues now exhibited in the Luxor Museum were buried in the temple, and a scene on the ceiling of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Denderah describes the goddess Nut overarching and protecting the solar barques in procession through the heavens as they carry their dead through the Duat. Perhaps the Egyptians used their time left on the planet to cut deep into the hillside in the Valley of the Kings and create an extensive network of tunnels and chambers. Was KV5, the recently explored underground complex credited to Ramses II and his family, with its one hundred twenty-one chambers supposedly created for his sons (did he not have daughters?), actually built as an attempt to survive impending catastrophe and to continue the species?

  The purpose of this book is not to answer these questions, but to propose possibilities based on the artifacts that are left. To question the historical account of ancient Egypt is disturbing to some. The responses to my previous writing on the subject have prompted me to present better evidence. I believe I have accomplished this here. Others will no doubt weigh in on the subject, and I am sure some will object to my conclusions.

  Though the subject of the kinds of tools used by the ancient Egyptians to cut stone holds a continuing interest for many professionals and laypeople alike, the debate has to move beyond the question of what cut the stones to an even more crucial question: What guided the tools? The amazing geometry and precision of ancient Egyptian artifacts can
not be lost in the debate about whether a coring tool left its mark as helical or horizontal grooves. Though resolving this question is important, it would not be as important without the massive amount of contemporaneous evidence that demands another thorough examination of our past. When we attempt to answer questions of how the ancient Egyptians created their monuments, the most difficult aspects of the work must be identified and replicated to the same form and precision as the originals.

  Why is this important? For many people manufacturing precision is an abstract concept with which they have no personal involvement. Precision manufacturing demands strict adherence to a blueprint or engineering drawing. To replicate an object that is already made, it is necessary to make blueprints describing every characteristic of the object and to make sure that the copy of the original is the same.

  We are surrounded by precise objects, which populate and shape our environment, but there was a time in history when this was not the case. In less time than the whole of ancient Egypt’s fourth dynasty (2613–2494 BCE), the period of one hundred nineteen years, during which the Great Pyramid was supposedly built, civilization has moved from a predominantly manually intensive agrarian society in which the apprentice was unpaid and beholden to the master to learn his trade to one that trains schoolchildren how to live with technology so sophisticated and rapidly changing that often the children are called upon to teach their parents how to use it.

  My background in precision machining has given me an enduring and profound respect for what this dizzying progress of knowledge and technology has brought to our society. Over the years, scores of engineers and craftspeople have contacted me to tell me they share my perspective. One such engineer is Steven Garcia from Chicago, who visited Egypt more than forty years ago. In one of my discussions with him, he complained to me that I was not assertive enough in my treatment of ancient Egyptian artifacts and that I should be adamant that they could not have been produced without machines. Yet though I may not have been overly assertive in my beliefs on this subject, what I have written in the past has opened the debate. Since I started to publish my thoughts on this subject, I have continued to study the responses to my work as well as the evidence that has been offered to support the academic theories.

  Taking into account all the foregoing evidence, I will assert now, unequivocally, that what has been found in the archaeological record and used by experimentalists must be dismissed as grossly inadequate to the task of producing the marvelous artifacts of ancient Egypt. What, however, do we replace them with? How were the Ramses statues crafted? How much time would it take a sculptor to create the 1,000ton Colossi of Memnon? Or the 1,000-ton Ramses at the Ramesseum? Or the four colossal seated statues at Luxor?

  Appearing on the base of the Ramesseum Ramses is a verse by the Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus: “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”

  The challenge issued by Ramses to Diodorus Siculus in the first century BCE has not been met, but when it is fulfilled, Egypt’s true manufacturing genius will be recognized and understood. When we consider a culture that created an array of artifacts that in their variety exhibit incredible size, symmetry, and precision in materials that even today are among the most difficult on earth to shape and move, and we know what could not have produced them, the mystery of ancient Egypt looms before us like a stupendous abyss between that astonishing time in human endeavor and our own. It beckons to us across the ages and demands that we are as exacting and uncompromising in our quest for answers as the Egyptians were in crafting the artifacts that confront us with the questions and the challenge: “What am I? How did I come to exist? Build another just like me.”

  Footnotes

  *1 Matthew 7:20.

  *2 An article published in Atlantis Rising magazine entitled The Mega Saws of the Pyramid Builders (Issue 70, July/August 2008, Doug Kenyon, editor) contained a different photograph that was taken in 2007. After returning to Abu Roash in November 2008, I was able to take another photograph from a lower point. This photograph, used here, resulted in a different radius and, therefore, a different diameter saw. It should be noted, however, that the difference between the two is within 5 percent of their respective diameters. Also changed here is the formula to correct the tilt angle, which was published in AR 70 as (cutter diameter / radius2 = Sin of angle of tilt) and is corrected here to read (cutter diameter / radius2 = radian measure), from which the sine of the tilt angle can be obtained.

  *3 W. M. F. Petrie, Journ. Royal Anthrop. Inst., XIII (1884), pp. 90, 103–4; “Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh,” pp. 173–74; “Arts and Crafts,” p. 73; “Tools and Weapons,” pp. 44–45.

  *4 Added to Petrie’s table are metric measurements and distance (pitch) between the start point and end point of each turn, which have also been changed from quarter turns to degrees.

  Endnotes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for Truth in the Sciences,” Great Books of the Western World, vol 31 (Chicago: William Benton, 1952), 47.

  CHAPTER 1. THE SHADOWS OF LUXOR

  1. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Temple of Man (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1998).

  2. John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1993).

  3. Edward Malkowski, The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2007).

  4. See http://th­inkexist.com/quotes/b­runo_walter/ (accessed December 26, 2009).

  5. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Temple of Man.

  CHAPTER 2. THE SHADOWS OF RAMSES

  1. See http://en.wi­kipedia.org/wiki/Fib­onacci_number (accessed April 13, 2008).

  2. Sixth century CE; See http://en.wiki­pedia.org/wiki/In­dian_mathematics (accessed February 4, 2010).

  3. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Temple of Man.

  4. Ibid., 144.

  5. “Why the Pyramids,” www.egyptvo­yager.com/aida_main­page.htm (accessed February 4, 2010).

  6. Michael Schneider, A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 241.

  CHAPTER 3. THE RAMSES CHALLENGE

  1. Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, Her-Bak: The Living Face of Ancient Egypt, quoted in “From the Outer Temple,” www.dubois­lc.org/html/Prov­erbs.html (accessed February 4, 2010).

  2. Evan Hadingham, “Unlocking the Mysteries of the Parthenon,” Smithsonian (February 2008).

  CHAPTER 4. THE SHADOWS OF KARNAK

  1. Evan Hadingham, “Unlocking the Mysteries of the Parthenon,” 39.

  2. Denys A. Stocks, Experiments in Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt (London: Routledge, 2003).

  3. Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 21.

  4. “Preserving Ancient Treasures Using Modern Technologies,” www.worl­d-mysteries.com/s­ci_3dm.htm (accessed December 16, 2009).

  CHAPTER 5. THE SHADOWS OF THE SERAPEUM

  1. Mohamed Ibrahim and David Rohl, “Apis and the Serapeum,” Journal of the Ancient Chronology Forum 2 (1988): 10.

  2. Strabo, Geography, Book XVII, 23, http://rbedr­osian.com/Classic/­Strabo17b.htm (accessed May 20, 2010).

  3. Jimmy Dunn, “The Serapeum of Saqqara,” www.touregy­pt.net/features­tories/serapeum.htm (accessed January 16, 2010), quotation of Auguste Mariette’s Le Serapeum de Memphis.

  4. Aidan Dodson, “The Eighteenth-Century Discovery of the Serapeum,” KMT 11, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 50. (KMT is the ancient spelling for the name Khemit, which is the land that is now Egypt.)

  5. Ibid., 52.

  6. Mohamed Ibrahim and David Rohl, “Apis and the Serapeum,” 14.

  7. Personal communication with Eric Leither shortly after returning from Egypt in February 1995.

  8. Hossam Abulfotouh, “Giza Plateau M
apping Project,” Newsletter of the UIA Work Program Architecture and Heritage, Region-V 3, no. 1 (2006).

  CHAPTER 6. THE SHADOW OF THE SPHINX

  1. W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, first ed. (London: Field and Tuer; New York: Scribner & Welford, 1883). Republished online at Ronald Birdsall, ed., “The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh Online,” www.ronaldbir­dsall.com/gizeh (accessed February 4, 2010).

  2. Christopher Dunn, “Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt?” Analog (August 1984).

  3. See www.quote­s.net/quote/­6148 (accessed January 17, 2009).

  4. Ian Lawton and Chris Ogilvie-Herald, Giza the Truth: The People, Politics & History Behind the World’s Most Famous Archaeological Site (London: Virgin Publishing, 1999).