Forbidden History: Prehistoric Technologies, Extraterrestrial Intervention, and the Suppressed Origins of Civilization (36 page)

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The Obelisk Quarry Mystery

Do Egyptologists Really Know How These Monuments Were Created?

Christopher Dunn

I
n my articles and book, I have injected a distinct bias when I have viewed ancient Egyptian artifacts. In this article I will explain where my bias came from and I will answer the following questions: “Isn’t it possible to create all these wonderful artifacts in ancient Egypt with primitive tools? Because there are volumes of work that describe how these tools were capable of such work, we don’t need to resort to fantastic inventions that don’t exist in the archeological record, so why do you?”

My biased opinion of the level of technology used by the ancient Egyptians comes from many years of work in manufacturing. For six years (over 12,480 hours) I operated hand tools and machine tools of many varieties, both large and small, in the production of artifacts that were crafted to engineering specifications. At the end of this six years I had completed my apprenticeship and was presented with journeyman documents, to benefit from as I saw fit.

The opportunities that followed spanned more than three decades. During this time, I must admit that my bias was further reinforced by exposure to the environment in which I had chosen to make a living. The effect this environment has had on my brain, I fear, is irreversible. By the time I had been rescued and promoted to the sterile confines of a senior manager’s office, more than 62,400 hours of environmental exposure in engineering and manufacturing had left deeply embedded scars in my critical thinking skills regarding how things are made.

These scars describe a path of struggle: the struggle to convert ideas into physical reality. The struggle is to sketch an idea onto paper and then proceed to pour, cut, shape, and mold that idea, with precision, into a functioning device. The struggle is to employ every intellectual and physical tool available, within those disciplines of science, engineering, manufacturing, and metrology that embrace function, form, and precision.

However, these scars also describe a path of disappointment when ideas do not work and a path of elation when, having learned from mistakes, there is success. Associated with both, the higher forces of humility etch a little deeper.

Perhaps I was too hasty in exclaiming space-age precision after discovering an accuracy of .0002 inch on the inside of a large, prehistoric, granite box. Perhaps the lathe marks were not really lathe marks. Perhaps I am overconfident when I look at tool marks on an artifact and can identify the tool that made them. I have considered that a part of my bias could be related to a time in my career when I had to think like an American, rather than an Englishman.

But, then, I don’t remember any drastic changes there, except the revelation that engineers are forced to think in similar ways regardless of what country they are in. That’s the price of living in a physical world with natural laws. Of course, the other environmental effect of living in a culture different from the one in which you spent your formative years is the stripping away of preconceived chauvinistic views of your natal culture as it relates to other cultures. This leads to a greater tolerance and acceptance of the views of others.

The reason I am telling you this is to give you some idea of the mistake I made in presenting my work. Much of what I have taken for granted when looking at artifacts in Egypt needed to be more fully explained. I realized that I had been putting the cart before the horse. In studying ancient Egyptian artifacts, I looked at the final product and wrote about the geometry and the precision. For the most part, I neglected to discuss all of the methods that are required and by which these artifacts were created. To me it seemed obvious that they were the products of technologies of which there is no surviving evidence.

What I have been faced with, though, are arguments that cling to the notion that the use of primitive tools, such as stone hammers and pounders, copper chisels, and abrasive materials such as sand, is sufficient to explain the existence of
all
the stoneware created in ancient Egypt. It is argued that these tools, in the hands of a large, skillful workforce with plenty of time at its disposal, are capable of creating all of these artifacts. It is argued that the ancient Egyptians did not consider time in the same way we do. To the ancient Egyptians (a civilization that covered several millennia), a decade was but a drop in the ocean of time, a century a mere goblet. So when an Egyptologist is asked to explain how a particularly difficult-to-create object is made, the main ingredient is time, and lots of it.

For a culture that spanned so many centuries, the ancient Egyptians were building for eternity. By their architecture and building materials, they were quite obviously concerned about the continuity of their Ka, or spirit, and the continuity of their civilization. It all sounds very logical and complete, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement. I cannot deny that handwork can produce many beautiful and precise objects in extremely difficult-to-work materials.

Yet even as I found myself agreeing, I still had a nagging concern that something was not quite right. There had to be a more cogent argument to which orthodox Egyptologists would listen. It has become quite obvious that ringing my bell next to artifacts that are incredibly precise was falling on deaf ears.

Following the publication of my previous article, entitled “Precision
,
” I engaged in some discussions on Internet message boards. This is not the first time I have participated in such discussions. Since I discovered these aerobic exercises for the fingers, as far back as 1995, my enthusiasm for such discourse has been tempered by the reality that in most cases Internet debates are time-wasting and futile. I have been advised to avoid them like the plague—mostly by those who are closest to me, my family (particularly my wife).

Nevertheless, out of this masochistic exercise came some insight as to how I can redress my mistakes. What I noticed is that I found myself discussing my work with people who did not agree with my conclusions. Because they did not agree with my conclusions, they quickly adopted the findings of scholars who have published their own studies and who articulated conclusions that are more consistent with what is believed about the history of the ancient Egyptians.

The foremost authority on ancient Egyptian stoneworking today is Denys Stocks, of Manchester University. Stocks’s work effectively trumps any prior commentary on the subject and is invaluable in analyzing the techniques of the ancient stonemasons. Stocks’s opinions on the subject carry more weight because they are based on experimental data gathered in Egypt using materials that are a part of the archeological record. The opinions of Sir William Flinders Petrie in his book
Pyramids and Temple of Gizeh (
which was published in 1893) and Lucas and Harris in their
Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries
are preempted by Stocks’s field studies and considerable effort. The most recent work by Stocks was the Aswan project funded by “NOVA” during the creation of its “Obelisk” documentaries.

For this reason, I will focus on the working of granite, for in the course of his credible and scientific research at Aswan, Stocks produced some hard data on material removal rates that enables us to perform a reasonably accurate time study. The analysis is quite simple and is used by estimating engineers in manufacturing to provide estimated costs for producing modern-day artifacts.

What follows are calculations based on Stocks’s research on the amount of time necessary to quarry one granite obelisk. The time will not include the time necessary for pulling its 440-ton mass out of the quarry. Nor do the calculations address the finishing of the block to its smooth, flat surface, or the numerous deeply etched, incredible glyphs. Last, they do not take into account the time it would take to transport and erect the obelisk in front of Pylon V at Karnak.

We will start at the Aswan granite quarries, where we will select a suitable area for our stone. Based on the finished dimensions, the raw piece of stone will be tall. The method used by the ancient Egyptians to separate a large, important stone from the bedrock was to cut a channel all the way around the piece and then undercut it, leaving pillars supporting its weight. This hypothesis seems most reasonable and sensible. When looking at the unfinished obelisk at Aswan, we see that a trench was cut all around the obelisk, and if work had continued, an undercut would have been necessary to separate the granite from the bedrock.

The channel has scoop-shaped quarry marks, which led the Egyptologist Dieter Arnold to claim that each worker “sent to the granite” was assigned an area of “75 centimeters (10 palms) wide and divided into working sections 60 centimeters long, the minimum space for a squatting or kneeling worker.” This would be a somewhat cramped area barely two feet by two and a half feet wide for a worker swinging a heavy stone ball, and considering that there would have needed to be a line of workers, each one equally aggressive in wielding his stone ball, the risk of injury does not go unnoticed.

Nevertheless, for the sake of argument, I will use these figures in my calculations. Mark Lehner, in the “Obelisk” documentary, concurred that this method was probably the one used by the ancient Egyptians, and he even performed some experimental work himself.

Based on the material removal rate information, therefore, a quick analysis of the time necessary to quarry an obelisk can be made, though we might believe that, with a sufficient amount of labor, the time it takes to accomplish a given project could be reduced. This is not necessarily true. Within any project are constraints or bottlenecks. So while we may command a workforce of one thousand, a bottleneck will effectively reduce the number engaged in a given project significantly. The constraint in the obelisk-quarrying project is the number of workers able to work on a two-foot by two-and-a-half-foot patch of granite.

Obviously, this is only one at a time. The time it would take to quarry the block, therefore, is based on the cubic mass of material to be removed, divided by the material removal rate. The mass of material is the width, multiplied by the length, multiplied by the depth. (The results follow the metric dimensions presented by Stocks, which are given in cubic centimeters [cu.cm]. Meters, feet, and inches are also given.) The depth of the channel is open to question. Looking at the photographs, there is a considerable amount of bedrock removed, down to the top of the block.

It could be argued that other blocks might have been quarried away from its top for other purposes and, therefore, this distance could not be considered part of the project. I will estimate, therefore, that the depth of the channel had to have sunk into the bedrock nine feet for the obelisk and another two feet for the undercut. The depth has to include quarrying deep enough that a worker may quarry a channel underneath the block that is wide enough for him to crawl under to chisel away the rock.

In the following table, it is assumed that a worker is pounding the granite using a dolerite ball. Stocks estimates that the material removal rate for a dolerite ball is thirty cubic cm per hour. While there was no mention of the removal of waste or the replacement of pounders as they became ineffective, it is assumed that the material removal rate continues unabated, according to Stocks’s experimental data.