Ancient Egyptian drill holes question

Could be, for the ones in the quarry. It still has to be new to be where a bit of rock was recently cut, though. Some of the others that the woosters produced were a bit more elaborate, though.
 
A star-shaped hole that's large enough and/or shallow enough to reach into the hole and shape the hole with a smaller hand tool is hardly a miraculous feat.
 
IsThisTheLife said:
"Star holes";

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMIudOPQJDc
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You only need to look at the still that is the thumbnail of the YT video to see exactly what I'm talking about. You see a stone face that is erroded and pitted and irregular, and a hole in it whose edges are surprisingly clean, smooth and conspicuously NOT eroded in any way.

And I'm supposed to believe that that's prehistoric in fact.

I'm sticking to my previous impression: even among woowoo, this strikes me as the 'by complete morons, for complete morons' kind.
 
For anyone actually interested, the bore-holes ("star holes") in question can be seen mostly from about two-minutes into the video.

Like I said - copper tubes and sand my (lily-white) a***.
 
Yeah, no, I agree about your ass. Err... I mean, about the copper tube. Those were definitely done in more modern times and with presumably more modern tools :p
 
HansMustermann said:
@davefoc
I would assume that they didn't use iron, simply because this was happening before the iron age, really.

Egyptians actually starting producing their own iron is debatably somewhere between 1000 and 586 BC. A good argument can be made that it wasn't until the 7th century BC, when the Ionians came to the Nile Delta and brought along iron smelting. But it could be as late as 586 BC, which really is the earliest we can actually support with evidence.
If it seems way late compared to anyone else, remember that Egypt wasn't EXCLUSIVELY limited to imported tin for bronze, and it's one reason they survived the collapse of trade networks in the end of the bronze age collapse. Empires around them collapsed, Egypt survived only weakened.
(A parallel would be, say, China, which also couldn't give a flip and continued using bronze all the way into AD times.)
So, anyway, Egypt didn't have the same do-or-die pressure to move to iron as everyone else. Wrought iron weapons weren't really any better than bronze weapons, so if you still had the ability to make bronze, meh, it still works.
And the 1st millennium BCE is simply way late to have any bearing on most of what people talk about when the whole aliens things comes up. By then there were no more pyramids being built, for example.
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Thanks for the response. I wasn't thinking about whether it was possible that the Egyptians could have used iron when I wondered about whether iron might not have worked as well as copper even though iron is much harder than copper. I see the copper tube plus abrasive cutting technique as similar to the idea used in modern cutting tools where very hard abrasives are embedded in softer materials. I suspect that might be a key to why copper works. The much harder abrasives are partially embedded into the copper as the tool is worked. This provides a mechanism to drag the abrasives around the hole being cut. I was just making a guess that the technique wouldn't work very well with a much harder material in place of the copper.

This line of thought led me to wonder about embedding the abrasive into the molten copper an idea that Rob Swanson suggested as well. I notice in a more recent post that he thinks that using the abrasive as a separate powder is probably more practical. I'm not sure. I think embedding the abrasive in the copper might be the most effective way to go if the manufacturing process for making drills like this could be mastered.

As to whether the Egyptians could have used iron: There were 19 or so iron objects found in Tutankhamen's tomb (14th century BCE) but as HM suggests the Egyptians were far away from making iron objects routinely at that time. The iron objects that were found were probably made from meteorites and they were probably not made by Egyptians and they were definitely made much later than the earliest holes.
 
Well, there's a reason I was talking about iron smelting.

The occasional iron meteorite being turned into a weapon, sure, existed all the way to prehistory, but they were super-rare and therefore super-expensive. They also tended to be considered magical.

So, you know, if you actually had one of those super-rare chunks of magical star metal, would you rather fashion it into a weapon or two, or have it used up to drill a hole in a stone? :p
 
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That said, I still think that copper would be a better metal for a drill or cutting band even just for price alone.

Iron was cheaper than bronze only by the time they started properly smelting it from ore, and really only because tin and copper aren't found in the same place, so bronze involves a bunch of long distance trade. Iron was, however, never cheaper than copper.

Producing iron was actually quite work intensive. Producing iron from ore involved using charcoal and iron oxide ore, to basically burn the coal with the oxygen from the iron oxide, leaving a sponge-like "bloom" of metal with lots of bits of rock in it. (Sponge because just the iron had less volume than the iron oxide.) Then you had to heat and hammer it and fold it and repeat, just to force most of the bits of rock out. That involves a LOT of manual labour and a lot more charcoal after the initial smelting into bloom, to get a usable bar of iron.

Iron was actually incredibly expensive in the ancient world and even all the way through the early middle ages. It was only cheaper than bronze in that bronze was even more bloody expensive, and the weapon-grade bronze doubly so.

Copper, by comparison, you kinda start with a similar mix of coal and ore, but you just get molten copper that you can pour out, with the slag being left behind. No further processing is needed. You can pretty much do it on an industrial scale right next to the mine, with most of the work being just making the charcoal, and loading and firing the furnace.

The latter was always going to end up much cheaper than iron even in the iron age, as long as you had the copper deposits to mine locally. Which Egypt had plenty.

So my take is that basically I don't know if iron would be better for dragging sand around, but I doubt that it would be better enough to justify the difference in price. If it saves you 15 minutes when drilling a hole, but it involved an extra man-day to make the iron band instead of copper, the economics simply aren't there.
 
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HansMustermann said:
You only need to look at the still that is the thumbnail of the YT video to see exactly what I'm talking about. You see a stone face that is erroded and pitted and irregular, and a hole in it whose edges are surprisingly clean, smooth and conspicuously NOT eroded in any way.

And I'm supposed to believe that that's prehistoric in fact.

I'm sticking to my previous impression: even among woowoo, this strikes me as the 'by complete morons, for complete morons' kind.
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Ancient Starhole Aliens be using Torx™ spec. bitches!
 
Jack by the hedge said:
I'm reminded that a handheld drill tends to want to make triangular (well, 3-lobed) holes in sheet metal if you don't hold it still enough. It made me think about how a long drill bit with a chisel tip might precess (if that's the right term) and make interesting shapes as you drill deep into rock in a quarry.
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From what I can gather, that appears to be basically it. They are holes drilled for mine blasting. They intend to drill a circular hole, but sometimes the vibrations get caught in reinforced frequency patterns and they get star holes.

See:

http://www.stonestructures.org/html/star-holes.html

https://www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/category/stone-holes
 
re. polygonal / star-shaped holes;

I wonder if there's any connection to the neolithic 'stone balls' (or 'stone things') which turn up all over Northern Europe? There's a correspondence in the shape and size shape of many of them, and as with the bore-holes it's practically impossible to explain how they were made (no metal at all at the time).
 
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"No metal at all" is actually wrong for most of the Neolithic. Copper has been in use from circa 8000 BCE, which is actually a lot earlier than the first known stone balls.

In fact, one of the sites in China literally discovered a copper sword together with the stone balls. So, you know, so much for "no metal at all".

Second, you don't actually need metal anyway to polish stone. As I was saying on the first flippin' page, in a pinch you can use wood just as well. In fact nowadays sanding a hole is mostly done with a wooden dowel.

Hell, you can even use PAPER to rub something with sand. You know, SANDPAPER? It wouldn't have been known at the time, but just shows that you don't actually need anything stronger than paper to get the job done.
 
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HansMustermann said:
"No metal at all" is actually wrong for most of the Neolithic. Copper has been in use from circa 8000 BCE, which is actually a lot earlier than the first known stone balls.

In fact, one of the sites in China literally discovered a copper sword together with the stone balls. So, you know, so much for "no metal at all".

Second, you don't actually need metal anyway to polish stone. As I was saying on the first flippin' page, in a pinch you can use wood just as well. In fact nowadays sanding a hole is mostly done with a wooden dowel.

Hell, you can even use PAPER to rub something with sand. You know, SANDPAPER? It wouldn't have been known at the time, but just shows that you don't actually need anything stronger than paper to get the job done.
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I understand what you're saying; for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years, modern humans just didn't know what to do with themselves and whiled away the time maneuvering megaliths around the landscape and carving intricate stone ornaments (perhaps they were paperweights? The paper wouldn't have left traces I guess). But essentially it was all a meaningless waste of that time and effort, motivated by nothing but superstition and "woo", no mystery in any of it.
 
IsThisTheLife said:
I understand what you're saying; for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years, modern humans just didn't know what to do with themselves and whiled away the time maneuvering megaliths around the landscape and carving intricate stone ornaments (perhaps they were paperweights? The paper wouldn't have left traces I guess). But essentially it was all a meaningless waste of that time and effort, motivated by nothing but superstition and "woo", no mystery in any of it.
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For how long is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona being built now? And have you seen the size of the thing? Or for that matter any respectable cathedral?

Very beautifull, but essentially it is alll a meaningless waste of that time and effort, motivated by nothing more than superstition and "woo", no mystery in any of it.
 
erwinl said:
For how long is the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona being built now? And have you seen the size of the thing? Or for that matter any respectable cathedral?

Very beautifull, but essentially it is alll a meaningless waste of that time and effort, motivated by nothing more than superstition and "woo", no mystery in any of it.
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You and I might as well speak different languages. I fear you just can't or won't (i.e. you will refuse, out of pathology) understand what I'm saying.

We can all see how your example is being built, hence no 'mystery', but if you have explanations for how those boreholes and the 'things' were made, then please present them, preferably with modern examples that duplicate them. That's rhetorical - you won't be able to do do so.
 
IsThisTheLife said:
You and I might as well speak different languages. I fear you just can't or won't (i.e. you will refuse, out of pathology) understand what I'm saying.

We can all see how your example is being built, hence no 'mystery', but if you have explanations for how those boreholes and the 'things' were made, then please present them, preferably with modern examples that duplicate them. That's rhetorical - you won't be able to do do so.
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My post was more about your declaration that it would have been improbable for ancient people to do great things out of superstition. A point you quite nicely ignored.

But more importantly. You haven't made a convincing argument, yet, that these holes are indeed as old as you suggest they are.

As such, I don't need to anything. I'm satisfied with the explanation offered in the links of post 173 by DevilsAdvocate. At least for plausability.
 
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