Ancient Egyptian drill holes question

I think for ordinary round holes in stones a bow drill and two workers could do it. Metal anything optional. Desert climates tend to make trees and bushes tough hard wood. Even if not in the local scrub a tradesman could get it imported from not too far away. Keeping supply plentiful and cheap to use wood dowels and a bow drill. Abrasives picked up off the floor were plentiful too.
I live in the land of post and block houses. A builder needs a bucket, trowel, hammer and strings. The most high tech is a level and measuring tape. A helper needs a shovel and bucket. Ladders are made on site with wood for forms and scaffolding is outright scary.

Other than bringing form wood and raw materials the builder can use a bike. He doesn't need a truck.


Ancient builders most likely worked under similar conditions. Only bring what cannot be found or improvised on site. Aztec builders made cement on site. Scrub wood to turn limestone into cal and sand /gravel found on site or broken from local rocks. It managed to last more than 500 years where not exposed directly to the elements. Better formulas made the pyramid of the sun just outside Mex City.
They had baskets, sticks and rocks to build a huge structure.
 
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You know, it always struck me that the aliens come across as outright ass holes in these retarded scenarios.

I mean, imagine you were stranded on a primitive planet, where disease is unchecked and you can die slowly and horribly from just stepping on a thorn, famines are periodically recurring events (as demonstrated by bone density studies), infant mortality is through the roof, life expectancy is about 30 years if you made it past that, and about 1 in 3 males will die murdered in the endemic warfare that is a constant in those tribal societies. You know, about the conditions in which neolithic humans lived.

And you have a ship with you and presumably a huge database of science and whatnot.

Now what could you teach them? Why, of course, just how to make useless funny holes in rocks and how to stack rocks on top of each other, just so woowoo cretins 10000 years later would have something to confabulate about. Oh, and also don't forget to teach them a religion with you as a god, and which requires horrible human sacrifices :p

I already wrote a long list in other treads of what _I_ could teach those guys if I were stranded there and not a complete ass hole. You know, stuff like ceramic water filters so they don't die of dysentery, agriculture and stuff like that.

Let me add even more new stuff:

- a flippin' Stirling engine. It's simple, doesn't explode and kill people like a proper steam engine, and it works for any kind of difference of temperature between the hot plate and the cold plate. Especially for places like Egypt, you can even just dye the top plate black, and stick the bottom plate on a copper rod stuck in the Nile, and you have infinite solar energy.

- a water pump. It may seem elementary, but it wasn't invented until Archimedes. And why that's important is irrigation. A lot of places weren't suited for agriculture just because you couldn't get the water uphill from the river except by having lots of guys with buckets carrying it uphill. But stick a spiral in a tube and have the above mentioned Stirling motor driving it, and you can feed millions.

- a paddleboat. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Yep, combine such a solar powered engine (or you can just light a fire on the top plate if you want more power) with a boat and two wheels with paddles, and you've kickstarted the mother of all trade networks.

- pulleys. Again, they appear very late in human history. Just think of how it would have simplified construction and a lot of other things.

Etc.

But no, let's just teach them to stack rocks and sacrifice women to me, by skinning them alive. THAT is what those primitive screwheads need ;)
 
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Has he provided a response for how the demonstrably ancient holes have clear signs of erosion while the star holes, which as mentioned seems to be from more recent blasting, do not show tmsimilar erosion?
Or is that another ignored point?
 
ShadowSot said:
Has he provided a response for how the demonstrably ancient holes have clear signs of erosion while the star holes, which as mentioned seems to be from more recent blasting, do not show tmsimilar erosion?
Or is that another ignored point?
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No.
But obviously holes, made with alien technology, would never erode in the same way as mere ordinary holes. That’s the proof that they are alien technology holes, you know.
 
erwinl said:
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.
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Superstition nothing. You get a bunch of us guys arguing about who's got the biggest balls, and whole fields worth of giant stone balls is just what you'd expect ;)
 
IsThisTheLife said:
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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Why on earth do you need modern examples that duplicate ancient technology?
We have stuff that works better than most of it.
 
You know, seeing this thread made me realize most of my handy links on ancient Egyptian and other cultures stone working techniques are defunct and Google is pretty useless.
Anyone recommend a few?
 
HansMustermann said:
infant mortality is through the roof, life expectancy is about 30 years if you made it past that
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Slight correction: life expectancy was 35-40 including a freaking 50% child mortality rate. If you got into adulthood it was much higher.

Especially if you were in the higher classes. Hell, my boy Ramses II lived to be 91.
 
Belz... said:
Slight correction: life expectancy was 35-40 including a freaking 50% child mortality rate. If you got into adulthood it was much higher.

Especially if you were in the higher classes. Hell, my boy Ramses II lived to be 91.
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Well, in Old Kingdom Egypt the second peak of the curve was at about 35 for males and 25 for females (childbirth was a real killer), hence my taking an average of 30. And yeah, that's not even life expectancy at birth, it's life expectancy if you survived the infant mortality spike. AT BIRTH it would be a much lower figure.

It rose by about 10 years for both by New Kingdom times, but by then they weren't building the great monuments and stuff that ancient alien woowoo peddlers get excited about.

Edit: and yes, the pharaoh and nobles tended to live longer, but the rest of the gang rarely made it to 91. Hell, even for the pharaohs, when Pepi II Neferkare lived long enough to reign for at least 62 years and possibly as long as 94, he ended up outliving not only his sons, but also his grandsons, starting the crisis that would end up in the 1st Intermediate Period. Which should tell you that even the life expectancy of a royal prince wasn't huge.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Well, in Old Kingdom Egypt the second peak of the curve was at about 35 for males and 25 for females (childbirth was a real killer), hence my taking an average of 30. And yeah, that's not even life expectancy at birth, it's life expectancy if you survived the infant mortality spike. AT BIRTH it would be a much lower figure.
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Do you have a source for that? That contradicts my understanding of human historical life expectancy.
 
By all means: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2015/03/02/old-age-in-ancient-egypt/

Well, it looks like either the data has shifted the numbers a bit since like two decades ago, or my memory ain't infallible after all. Probably the latter, if I'm to be honest. Still, it looks like I wasn't off by much, and it still makes the point I was going for.

That said, there's something that confuses people about life expectancy in ancient Egypt. When you read the obituaries, so to speak, you find a lot of people said to have lived to 110 years old. That sounds like, yea, as the tail of the curve, it kinda fits what you'd expect nowadays. They must have had a similar life expectancy as we do, right?

Except then you read his date of birth and the date they buried him -- because Egyptians recorded that kinda thing -- and it's only, say, 35 years in between. So if they buried him at 35 and he lived to 110, he must have been bored stiff for his last 75 years :p

And the answer is: numerology. 110 years was the perfect number for a human to live, so saying that someone lived to 110 was just basically saying, yeah, he lived a full life, he was liked by the community, you get the idea. It's just metaphoric language.

So yeah, always look at the dates, ignore any ages mentioned in texts.
 
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Oh, and by the way, it's POSSIBLE that they made Pepi II Neferkare reign 94 years -- even though he disappears from the records after his 62nd ruling year -- to make him live 110 years. You know, as the last great king from the good old days, before it all degenerated into a bloody civil war.

Or not. There's no way to be sure. Maybe the guy was just senile and useless but not DEAD after his 62'nd year in power, so they just didn't have any great deeds to commemorate in writing about him, but was still technically the ruler until he died 32 years later. Would explain why the nomarchs (city rulers) had so much unchecked power by the end of it.

So, you know, fun times either way :p
 
So 110 was basically the Egyptian equivalent of three-score years and ten?
 
HansMustermann said:
- a flippin' Stirling engine. It's simple, doesn't explode and kill people like a proper steam engine, and it works for any kind of difference of temperature between the hot plate and the cold plate. Especially for places like Egypt, you can even just dye the top plate black, and stick the bottom plate on a copper rod stuck in the Nile, and you have infinite solar energy.
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OT - I think your post was partly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm struggling to think of a Stirling design that can do useful work yet does not require well developed machine tools or material science. Might want to teach them how to make smelters, lathes, drills, and tool steel first (or high-speed steel & carbide if you're really ambitious.) :D
 
jimbob said:
So 110 was basically the Egyptian equivalent of three-score years and ten?
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Well, more like the song "Summer of 69" was not, according to the author, about the year. The number 69 also means something entirely different than a number :p

It was kinda like that with 110 for Egyptians.
 
Galaxie said:
OT - I think your post was partly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm struggling to think of a Stirling design that can do useful work yet does not require well developed machine tools or material science. Might want to teach them how to make smelters, lathes, drills, and tool steel first (or high-speed steel & carbide if you're really ambitious.) :D
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Well, I'll admit that it would be fiddly to get it right. But a lot less so IMHO than what is involved in having an electric drill, including the power plant, power lines, etc, not to mention the metallurgy for that carbide tipped drill, like the pyramidiots want me to believe. So, you know, if we're at the level where there's no limit to how much technology you can give those primitive guys, I still think an engine is easier to get right.
 
I'm now imagining a neolithic Stirling engine.
 
davefoc said:
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.
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Sure but they had bronze as well that is as good as iron if often more expensive, and laping techniques often use soft metals to imbed the abrasive to work on harder metals, copper laps are still common for use on steel for example.
 
jimbob said:
I'm now imagining a neolithic Stirling engine.
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Well, think the alpha type, as probably the easiest one. Although a type beta isn't all that much more complicated, and probably fits even better for working as basically just a vertical tube with the top dyed black to absorb sunlight and the bottom part in the Nile for cooling.

Now think of just using copper for all of it. Since elemental copper has been available for about 10,000 years now.

Now... make a tube that will serve as the mould for the whole thing. Could even be wooden. You may have to teach them how to make a lathe to get it perfectly uniform diameter, but it can be turned by foot, so you don't need engines or anything at this stage.

Now you make the cylinders of the engine by wrapping the sheet copper around that one.

For the pistons basically you go back to the lathe again and make another cylinder the same diameter. Then basically cut slices out of it. This will exactly fit the inner diameter of the cylinders.

There we go, really. No advanced tools or materials needed.

And in the process we also taught them how to make and use a lathe, which will serve them well.
 
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