Ancient Egyptian drill holes question

The only stone polishing I have done is limited to the cut ends of granite and marble countertops with modern abrasives and power tools, and it's still very easy to make a bad job of it. Drilling holes in stone, though... I've done plenty of that. Modern carbide and industrial diamond core-drills and hole-saws are guided by the machines that turn them, or by a mandrel that self-centers in a pilot hole. Even with those technological advancements, getting the hole to precisely track the course you want it to presents the greatest difficulty in the task.

Looking at the images of the weighted crank drills in HansMusterman's link to the Penn Museum site, I can imagine that the use of such a tool would take me a day to learn and a week to develop anything approaching proficiency. Getting the thing started without wandering must be a real bitch with only a shallow chiseled groove to constrain the cylinder. I also imagine that such a hefty device would require some months of painful physical training before one could run the beast for four hours at a go.
 
@HighRiser:
Well, at the time (and for the next 3000 years straight) technology didn't evolve very fast and people had several years of apprenticeship to learn a job. And especially stonecutting and carving were in huge demand in Egypt, and thus a profitable trade to learn. Not just due to pyramids, but also due to religious stuff like the cube statues that could support your dead relatives' Ka (soul.)

So I'd imagine there wasn't a shortage of people more than willing to spend years (not just months) learning every way to cut or drill a stone.

But yeah, to be sure, doing it must have been VERY tiring and even painful work. Especially doing it in he sun at like 120 degree temperatures.
 
Noriabooks said:
Ok, here we go! Wasn't THAT hard? Well, I can only blame myself for not finding it on my own but what can I do? I just didn't. Excuse me. Right!
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Your particular and unusual google is broken. Okay.

Noriabooks said:
If this drill result they show, is really theirs, then this is the jackpot! That is EXACTLY what I'm looking for!! The only thing I'm worried is that this site doesn't have much information about it. Just a couple af pics and as a skeptic, you might understand yourself that this is just a bit too few to prove something. But really, thank you very much for finding even that much. This may give me some hope that someone has done this with a bit more documentation if you know what I mean.
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Are you seriously suggesting that it was beyond your ability to google it all on your lonesome? Really?

Noriabooks said:
Can you tell me more specifically, if there are any videos or better references about what they do/did? No newer materials? Everything i find about them online seems to be from past. I'm just always looking for better material, nothing else.
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Are you really suffering under the illusion that it must be on youtube or else it isn't true? Go to a library, or an actual university.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as an internet. Want to research anything? then you stuck your head in the libraries and universities. You made the effort to compose snail-mails to the actual experts. And you waited for the snail mail replies.

You must realise that A) not everything is on the internet and B) somehow everyone functioned perfectly well before there ever was an internet and C) not everything on the internet is remotely true.

It is well known, for example, that Abraham Lincoln stated that quotations on the internet are largely untrue. Prove me wrong.
 
HighRiser said:
The only stone polishing I have done is limited to the cut ends of granite and marble countertops with modern abrasives and power tools, and it's still very easy to make a bad job of it. Drilling holes in stone, though... I've done plenty of that. Modern carbide and industrial diamond core-drills and hole-saws are guided by the machines that turn them, or by a mandrel that self-centers in a pilot hole. Even with those technological advancements, getting the hole to precisely track the course you want it to presents the greatest difficulty in the task.

Looking at the images of the weighted crank drills in HansMusterman's link to the Penn Museum site, I can imagine that the use of such a tool would take me a day to learn and a week to develop anything approaching proficiency. Getting the thing started without wandering must be a real bitch with only a shallow chiseled groove to constrain the cylinder. I also imagine that such a hefty device would require some months of painful physical training before one could run the beast for four hours at a go.
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Ninja'ed on this I think, but i'll continue anyway.....In the context that seems like a pretty good argument for the technology. If the Egyptian structure was like many others, one might well expect a person doing this to be a specialist, perhaps to have apprenticed in the craft. Things can happen pretty slowly. Imagine if you were a stone driller, doing this all by hand, but not in such a modern hurry. Imagine if you're one of an army of craftsmen, and it's a good day's work to get one good straight hole through a rock. It's hard to start a trepan at a reasonably high feed speed without a guiding mechanism, but what if you did it carefully and slowly by hand? If you had a couple of hours in which to get an unguided hole saw started, and if this was a skill at which you had been trained, I imagine it would not seem so hard.
 
bruto said:
Ninja'ed on this I think, but i'll continue anyway.....In the context that seems like a pretty good argument for the technology. If the Egyptian structure was like many others, one might well expect a person doing this to be a specialist, perhaps to have apprenticed in the craft. Things can happen pretty slowly. Imagine if you were a stone driller, doing this all by hand, but not in such a modern hurry. Imagine if you're one of an army of craftsmen, and it's a good day's work to get one good straight hole through a rock. It's hard to start a trepan at a reasonably high feed speed without a guiding mechanism, but what if you did it carefully and slowly by hand? If you had a couple of hours in which to get an unguided hole saw started, and if this was a skill at which you had been trained, I imagine it would not seem so hard.
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To expand on that. By default, modern recreations are perforce, amateur recreations. The Egyptians had tons of practice and learning. The odd expectation that a contemporary scientist should get it right at first blush seems more than a little odd. The craft of stoneworking was handed down over generations, yet somehow, contemporary scientits must be able to replicate this straight out of the box? That's baloney.
 
bruto said:
Ninja'ed on this I think, but i'll continue anyway.....In the context that seems like a pretty good argument for the technology. If the Egyptian structure was like many others, one might well expect a person doing this to be a specialist, perhaps to have apprenticed in the craft. Things can happen pretty slowly. Imagine if you were a stone driller, doing this all by hand, but not in such a modern hurry. Imagine if you're one of an army of craftsmen, and it's a good day's work to get one good straight hole through a rock. It's hard to start a trepan at a reasonably high feed speed without a guiding mechanism, but what if you did it carefully and slowly by hand? If you had a couple of hours in which to get an unguided hole saw started, and if this was a skill at which you had been trained, I imagine it would not seem so hard.
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Quite so, I'm sure. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the ancient specialists had many methods that have been lost to the mists of time.

abaddon said:
To expand on that. By default, modern recreations are perforce, amateur recreations. The Egyptians had tons of practice and learning. The odd expectation that a contemporary scientist should get it right at first blush seems more than a little odd. The craft of stoneworking was handed down over generations, yet somehow, contemporary scientits must be able to replicate this straight out of the box? That's baloney.
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Absolutely. The quality of the result of a job done with any tool is dependent upon the skill of the hand and mind that wield it.

The point I was trying to make is that today, there's no one to learn these skills from. The time that would have to be invested in relearning ancient crafts to the level that the ancients were able to achieve is vast, and no sane person is going to make such an investment.
 
Just to expand even more, though, they also didn't do very perfect jobs. You have the occasional aborted job, like the wrong angled cut in a sarcophagus or that botched obelisk they never finished. Hell, even in other domains, we have stuff like a botched mummy, which resulted in a nightmarish grimmace like the guy is frozen in the middle of a hell of a scream.

Even the holes we're talking in this thread, are not very perfect. They're not a constant diameter, for example, as you'd get with a modern drill. The hole widens by almost 25% to the outside, where the material pushed out was also pushing the emery particles sideways. They're just good enough to put a rope through and lift that stone lid.

Basically, while I have all respect for their craft and all, the pyramidiots often give the impression of a super-perfect job that rivals, or even surpasses, modern work. But it's not. The secrets of the old craftsmen weren't THAT perfect. It's impressive for that age, but that's about it.
 
Back on the topic, I would also like to add that while we don't have images of STONEMASONS drilling holes, we have a very good image of a CARPENTER drilling a hole in a box in the tomb of Ti. And, conveniently enough, it even has a legend that says "drilling of a box by a carpenter."

Needless to say, it shows no sign of any power tools. It's just a kneeling guy holding a vertical dowel with one hand, and presumably rotating it with a perpendicular stick held in the other hand. It's as low tech as it gets, really. It's lower tech than your grandfather's crank driven drill.

Source: Gold Of Praise, edited by Emily Teeter and John A Larsson, page 29

Anyway, you'd THINK that if the alien pharaohs had power tools to even drill holes in a vizier's sarcophagus, they'd also be used for the ceremonial boxes for the Pharaohs' tombs, right? (Those holes are in the sarcophagus of a vizier, not a Pharaoh.) I mean, right?

Edit: I stand corrected. We do have images of a stonemason drilling, e.g., in the mastaba of Senedjemib Inti. And again it actually has a caption that says "boring out a diorite vessel by the overseer of craftsmen."

Seems like it kinda solves it, innit? I mean, it's actual contemporary illustration of how it was done.
 
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HansMustermann said:
Back on the topic, I would also like to add that while we don't have images of STONEMASONS drilling holes, we have a very good image of a CARPENTER drilling a hole in a box in the tomb of Ti. And, conveniently enough, it even has a legend that says "drilling of a box by a carpenter."

Needless to say, it shows no sign of any power tools. It's just a kneeling guy holding a vertical dowel with one hand, and presumably rotating it with a perpendicular stick held in the other hand. It's as low tech as it gets, really. It's lower tech than your grandfather's crank driven drill.

Source: Gold Of Praise, edited by Emily Teeter and John A Larsson, page 29

Anyway, you'd THINK that if the alien pharaohs had power tools to even drill holes in a vizier's sarcophagus, they'd also be used for the ceremonial boxes for the Pharaohs' tombs, right? (Those holes are in the sarcophagus of a vizier, not a Pharaoh.) I mean, right?

Edit: I stand corrected. We do have images of a stonemason drilling, e.g., in the mastaba of Senedjemib Inti. And again it actually has a caption that says "boring out a diorite vessel by the overseer of craftsmen."

Seems like it kinda solves it, innit? I mean, it's actual contemporary illustration of how it was done.
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Our protaganist will find such things to be insufficiently personally satisfying as explanations. This gold standard of evidence will never be explained. Or met.

Am I getting more cynical as I age? Pretty much.
 
Well, I still like to start from a position of "I don't know what their motives are", until evidence is provided to change that expectation. No need to preemptively harrass the guy, is all I'm saying.

To return to the topic at hand, though, I'd like to add one more piece of circumstantial evidence:

What ancient alien theorists seem to conveniently forget is that Egyptians didn't just bore those holes. As I was saying, there was a LOT of demand for stone work in ancient Egypt.

E.g., when you thing vases and cups and such, you normally think ceramics, but Egyptians had lots of stone and a shortage of wood. So a LOT of such containers were actually hollowed out stone.

Hell, even door hinges consisted of the door at the lower end swinging around a stone with a hole in it.

There were literally hundreds of thousands of holes drilled each year.

That kind of abundance of power tools SHOULD leave a lot of archaeological record. We're not talking just one alien drill for the vizier's sarcophagus, which might get lost somewhere, but a MASSIVE industry of drilling or hollowing out stone. If there were power tools and carbide tungsten drill bits, the numbers involved say we'd be almost certain to find some of those drill bits. But we did't.
 
Noriabooks said:
I have thought about it but i see no reason why do it like that? To carv inner grooves into relatively narrow holes is a pain in the ass. Wouldn't you agree?

But about the "spiral" holes - I told I'm not even sure if they are spiral after all. If drilled as the conspiracy theorists suggest, they should be spiral but has anybody actually confirmed them to be spiral? If not, then the conspiracists are doomed in a blink of an eye. If they are, then we have one more thing to explain.
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Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once twice. You don't mean spiral, you mean helical.
 
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HighRiser said:
The point I was trying to make is that today, there's no one to learn these skills from. The time that would have to be invested in relearning ancient crafts to the level that the ancients were able to achieve is vast, and no sane person is going to make such an investment.
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There are iron age researchers who look into how some of the stuff they find might have been produced, but they don't delude themselves that a lot of it isn't guesswork. Good guesswork, and educated guesswork, but still guesswork.

Recreating an ancient craft with little more to go on than the final artifact and some bits of tools which may or may not have been the things used is not easy.

At least the Egyptologists have some pictorial guides!
:)
 
Tolls said:
There are iron age researchers who look into how some of the stuff they find might have been produced, but they don't delude themselves that a lot of it isn't guesswork. Good guesswork, and educated guesswork, but still guesswork.

Recreating an ancient craft with little more to go on than the final artifact and some bits of tools which may or may not have been the things used is not easy.

At least the Egyptologists have some pictorial guides!
:)
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Exactly. I've been following this to read up on the concepts, but the fundamentals is that while we have several, even many, good ideas how a thing was accomplished, we can't say for certain which one was used, or in what combination. For example, there's an excellent documentary called "Secrets of the Viking Sword"—I believe you can watch it on YouTube. A modern swordmaker sets out to craft an Ulfberht sword, starting with raw iron, and going through, very roughly, the process that a smith would to forge the sword. They make some changes to the process, and provide the reasoning for it, partially because the smiths of the time didn't know exactly what they were doing—it's how they were taught to do it, and they knew it worked.
 
RobRoy said:
Exactly. I've been following this to read up on the concepts, but the fundamentals is that while we have several, even many, good ideas how a thing was accomplished, we can't say for certain which one was used, or in what combination. For example, there's an excellent documentary called "Secrets of the Viking Sword"—I believe you can watch it on YouTube. A modern swordmaker sets out to craft an Ulfberht sword, starting with raw iron, and going through, very roughly, the process that a smith would to forge the sword. They make some changes to the process, and provide the reasoning for it, partially because the smiths of the time didn't know exactly what they were doing—it's how they were taught to do it, and they knew it worked.
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That was a decent documentary, but I think that the reverence with which they referenced the Ulfberht swords bordered on woo.

It reminded me a lot of the way Japanese swords are treated by people who don't know anything about swords. I half expected them to say that an Ulfberht sword could cut through the barrel of a gun.
 
arthwollipot said:
That was a decent documentary, but I think that the reverence with which they referenced the Ulfberht swords bordered on woo.

It reminded me a lot of the way Japanese swords are treated by people who don't know anything about swords. I half expected them to say that an Ulfberht sword could cut through the barrel of a gun.
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And in the same way that centuries from now a good piece of kit will be similarly fetishized by our descendants - the lost secrets of the Holland and Holland double rifle, etc.
 
arthwollipot said:
That was a decent documentary, but I think that the reverence with which they referenced the Ulfberht swords bordered on woo.

It reminded me a lot of the way Japanese swords are treated by people who don't know anything about swords. I half expected them to say that an Ulfberht sword could cut through the barrel of a gun.
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Naw, I get it. They are impressive swords for the time and technology. Compared to the standard iron sword that your average warrior might own, these did sorta border on the magical. Being able to craft one at the time, especially when they didn't exactly what the process was doing, is fascinating. It's grandma's Christmas ham, except in this case it actually had a reason.

Katanas get extra woo from Westerners because they're doubly exotic.
 
Well, technically katanas are also impressive technology FOR THE TIME AND PLACE. The available iron was simply too high in sulfur, and my take is basically that that's what it took to make a sword that can cut through silk with that material.

But, of course, that still falls short of cutting through machinegun barrels.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well, technically katanas are also impressive technology FOR THE TIME AND PLACE. The available iron was simply too high in sulfur, and my take is basically that that's what it took to make a sword that can cut through silk with that material.
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Agreed. There are different degrees of quality among the katanas, just as there are among Oakeshott type X, like the Ulfberht. Some are poor, some are decent and some are high quality. We certainly know the reasons for this, the smiths at the time may have had guesses, or may simply have been following a formula. Probably a mixture of the two, in the cases of the higher quality artifacts. :)
 
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