Ancient Egyptian drill holes question

Noriabooks said:
If the egyptians manages to produce lots of holes, then i don't see any reason why we cant produce them also. But we cant and i wonder why?
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We can't? Or we haven't?

Maybe no-one so far has bothered to try. Maybe it's difficult and no-one has managed to get the resources together yet. Perhaps you'd like to try.
 
arthwollipot said:
We can't? Or we haven't?

Maybe no-one so far has bothered to try. Maybe it's difficult and no-one has managed to get the resources together yet. Perhaps you'd like to try.
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It's even worse for Noriabooks. Such ancient drilling techniques actually have been replicated despite his/her protestations to the contrary that we can't.

Example. Plenty more in the listed references too.
 
arthwollipot said:
We can't? Or we haven't?

Maybe no-one so far has bothered to try. Maybe it's difficult and no-one has managed to get the resources together yet. Perhaps you'd like to try.
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It took me only a few moments to find this: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/obelisk/cutting07.html

Web content from 16 years ago, describing some practical archaeology carried out for the Nova TV show, including trepanning into granite with a copper tube drill and sand as the abrasive.

So when someone actually tries the technique, it turns out that it works.
 
There is one element still left; the suggestion that the grooves in the drilled holes might be spiral rather than radial:

Noriabooks said:
... of course i doubt that the grooves are spiral which the sould be if they were to indicate the drilling speed and step. Has anybody studied them and pointed out if they are just radial or spiral?
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It would certainly be very surprising indeed if the tool marks left in the drilled holes or the removed cores were spiral (implying a very fast cutting speed) but my first thought is that it would be such a "holy cow!" discovery that somebody would have mentioned it. It's not something you're likely to resolve by searching through still images unless you can get a really good profile picture of a core, clear enough to see that the grooves are exactly at right angles to the cut.
 
Noriabooks reaction to this complete and utter answer will be interesting. I still suspect we are dealing with a supporter of the nutty alternative theories.

Oh, and Noriabrooks...........you meant helical rather than spiral.
 
MikeG said:
Noriabooks reaction to this complete and utter answer will be interesting. I still suspect we are dealing with a supporter of the nutty alternative theories.
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That was impression also as I've seen this 'asking questions because I'm debating a nut' approach many times before.
 
arthwollipot said:
We can't? Or we haven't?
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Neither, really. As I was saying, variants of the basic use of sand to cut or drill through much harder materials have been in use uninterrupted for thousands of years.

arthwollipot said:
Maybe no-one so far has bothered to try. Maybe it's difficult and no-one has managed to get the resources together yet. Perhaps you'd like to try.
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Well, or MAYBE you're just too nice and give people too much credit to know what they're talking about when they say that something can't or hasn't been done. Usually it's more of an (often unintentional) argument from ignorance: they haven't googled it, so obviously it's never been done :p

The fact is, for just about any ancient technique that you hear hyped as impossible to replicate, or impossible to do better, etc, chances are it has already been done and better. In fact, that's statistically the safest default position to assume.

Most of the reason that kind of thing isn't mainstream, which is really the only reason CT-ers never heard of it, is one or more of:

- it's not really needed any more (e.g., why we don't build bigger pyramids or better katanas)

- it's not very efficient or good bang per buck (e.g., why we use a locomotive instead of people pulling huge stones on sleds)

- we can do much better, so there's no reason to do the old thing (e.g., hell, not only we can build a better pyramid, but so could the Egyptians. Imhotep's first pyramid was a MUCH more advanced design than Cheops's: it used less material AND manpower AND offered vastly more interior space.)

Etc.

Or, of course, as in the case of using sand, we ARE still doing the same things. We're just using power tools because it's cheaper and faster than having some guys do it by hand. But there's nothing special about it, other than replacing muscle power with a motor, really.
 
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In fact, as someone with a bit of an interest in ancient Egypt, here's something that most people don't realize: far from being examples of advanced tech, Egyptian pyramids and generally monuments were SUPPOSED to be pretty much the LEAST efficient use of manpower even at the time.

You want to know what they were? They were the equivalent of the 19'th century follies in the UK. You know, building some castle in the middle of nowhere, or a road leading from nowhere to nowhere. It was the pre-keynesian (only) kind of pseudo-welfare. You wouldn't just give the poor money, because we thought it will just make everyone lazy. So you'd pay them to do some useless construction effort instead.

It was actually a bad thing if the Pharaoh didn't permanently have hordes of people working for his monument, or monuments. So if you finished your pyramid early, you'd start a bigger one. Like Cheops did. Or have people dig some pointless tunnels under it to keep them busy. Again, like Cheops did.

It wasn't even supposed to be some super-efficient use of material or manpower. It was actually just supposed to keep a whole lot of people employed. Even if it was with pointless stuff like digging some tunnels to nowhere.
 
MikeG said:
Noriabooks reaction to this complete and utter answer will be interesting. I still suspect we are dealing with a supporter of the nutty alternative theories.

Oh, and Noriabrooks...........you meant helical rather than spiral.
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Ya think? Blatant wolf in sheep's clothing. I don't believe this but my friend does? Does anyone buy that for a nanosecond ?

I think not.
Not to mention that our protagist is most shy. Odd that.
 
Once again, the crazy rush to be the first to call "Woo."

Congratulations. We've all seen JAQ trolls, but there's no actual evidence of that, here. Cut the new guys some breaks, kids. We're not attracting new members as it is. The gauntlet of suspicious cynics is not exactly a welcome wagon.
 
We can at least hope that Noriabooks has traipsed off to woo-land with a pile of crispy new evidence which he will show to his friend, argument by cogent argument, which, if he is a rationalist and his friend a pyramidiot in good standing, will result in a return post saying something like "I showed him all this good stuff and the * didn't believe a word of it."

Eventually he will learn that it's sometimes easier to drill through granite than through belief.
 
marplots said:
In this article, they talk about the trepanning type holes. The surprising thing is supposed to be the rate of the drilling based on spiral groves in the hole.

I don't have the expertise to evaluate the claim, but it does make you wonder.

http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/cdunn-3.php
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What if those spiral grooves are the grooves made by some sort of hollow tube, which was sort of jammed onto the standing pilar in order to grab it tightly (there might be some innuendo in there somewhere) in order to break it loose?

That might explain the apparant rate of drilling.

A bit like they do now with tapping screw threads in holes. The screw threads also don't indicate any rate of drilling.
 
marplots said:
In this article, they talk about the trepanning type holes. The surprising thing is supposed to be the rate of the drilling based on spiral groves in the hole.

I don't have the expertise to evaluate the claim, but it does make you wonder.

http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/egypt/articles/cdunn-3.php
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Well, you just need to read the next page to realize that the guy is too stupid to be having the conversation, when he says that copper couldn't cut granite because it's not hard enough. Yeah, copper couldn't, but it's not the copper doing the cutting: SAND is. Copper just pushes the sand around.

Basically it's like saying you couldn't polish stainless steel with sandpaper, because paper isn't harder than steel. Yeah, sure, but it's not the paper doing the abrading. The sand is. The paper just moves the sand around.

And his grooves thing is basically more of the same idiocy. Yes, if it were a modern drill, you COULD calculate the rate by the grooves. But it's just abrasion marks left by the loose sand particles. So it's like saying you can measure how fast a brushed steel elevator door was cut by measuring the distance between the brush grooves. It's just stupid.

And I've yet to see any evidence that they're spiral outside the same copy and pasted ASSERTION on pyramidiot sites. Though it wouldn't be a big surprise if it were a bit slanted, since it's a tapered core, and pushing the tube in would push sand and abraded material OUT as you turn the tube.

I mean, as you drill inwards, that material goes out.

So essentially all it indicates is the rate at which stuff got pushed out of the hole.
 
As I was saying, the cutting material was loose sand. A hollow copper tube (or a copper band when cutting straight) was just pushing the sand around. So, yeah, pushed out, extracted, or whatever else terminology boils down to the same thing ultimately.
 
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