For those who continue to believe nobody knows why the pyramids were built

Being a machinist, I know full well what a jig is. Are there any AE art that depicts these jigs you mention? If you read my previous posts I have talked about this already. Do you think they used a jig to keep saw blades on correct course or do you think it was done manually with no guides? a reply to: Harte

I didn’t bring Foerster into this. You have not addressed my points again regarding Resultant edge formation and the fact that neither sawn pounding nor chiselling techniques will make this object.Especially the recesses cut into it.
If you believe that this object was sawn pounded and chiselled with bronze you are in denial.
I have not mentioned a previous highly advanced civilisation before the AE’s, that’s not where I’m coming from, I am saying that just by looking at this object , It was not ‘carved’ : if you continue to believe this was ‘carved’ then you are just on the other end of the scale to how you perceive Foerster. Except you are clinging to the belief that men ‘carved’ those straight edges with copper, or pounders, and he is clinging to the belief that there was an advanced civilisation before the AE .
I only believe that it was produced in a way that doesn’t resemble anything to do with copper,bronze or pounders. a reply to: Harte

My apologies, I should have said ‘hand sawn’ when referring to the use of copper or bronze saws a reply to: bluesfreak

a reply to: Harte

cool thanks for the links Harte ill give those a read on lunch

Were the jigs you refer to made of metal or wood, do you suppose? Wood wouldn’t be very rigid against such a hard substance as granite . I would say to ‘carve’ , for instance , the symmetrical head/bust of Ramses at Luxor one would need a pretty sophisticated jig. Or wait, was it done with Dolerite (softer than granite) pounders or bronze or copper ( softer than granite) chisels , with the stonemason just ‘eyeing’ the piece into symmetry . I don’t mean to sound rude here, Harte, truly, but have you ever actually ‘made’ anything? I ‘make’ things every day on a lathe and a milling machine and I do know how resultant edges are formed and how you cannot cut a material with a softer material. I actually have some large lengths of rose granite at home and have personally tried to mark it ( let alone carve it) with softer materials and you really CANNOT even leave a mark in it, with the hardest bashing , and I am quite a strong guy. Look at the ‘carving’ on that symmetrical Ramses bust, you seriously think those eyelids, lips, nose were chiselled into shape with a soft metal that won’t mark the harder material? Oh wait, it was pounded into shape with a circular ball made of softer stone? No? Oh wait it was abrasively brought into symmetry with sand. If you’re not careful Harte,you’re going to become the mainstream version of Foerster on here . There must have been hitherto undiscovered techniques in play on many AE Granite pieces because the current explanations just do not hold up to closer scrutiny. a reply to: Harte

a reply to: bluesfreak

Just a few things I found online (for the interested):

Stocks, D.A. (2001) Testing Ancient Egyptian Granite-Working Methods in Aswan, Upper Egypt, Antiquity 75, 89-94.
Granite sawing, coring, surface smoothing, and carving with hand powered copper tools, dolerite hammers, flint chisels and punches, and "quartzite" rubbers, that would have been available to the ancient Egyptians.


Protzen, J. -P. (1986) Inca stonemasonry. Scientific American, 254, 94-105.
Andesite stone dressing by precussion with simple stone pounders.


Zuber, A. (1956) Techniques du travail des pierres dures dans 1'Ancienne tgypte. Techniques et Civilisations, V, pp. 161-80, 195-215.
Granite carving with flint tools, granite quarrying by wedges with percussion by diorite pounders.

Thanks Moebius, I’ll check out the bottom two, Stocks’ work is not quite proof of concept for me : it took them 3 days to cut a few mm down into the granite. Yes, you can make marks into granite using sand abrasive sawing, but I could also probably make a mark in an aluminium block with a lollipop stick after 3 days(maybe!) yes ,you can abrasively drill granite with a copper tube drill ( how did they make the tube drill so round? Bend it round a wooden tube shape? You’ll need a lathe to make the wooden former first, then. Yet they didn’t use lathes for bowl making??)
Im starting to get amused by ‘mainstream’ explanations that ridicule the ‘fringe’ explanations yet sound so ridiculous themselves.
The object I refer to on Elephantine Island ( that mainstream experts can’t decide is Egyptian, even though it has a damned Pyramid on its top) could not have been made with such a methods . reply to: moebius

Ps - on Stocks’ video , the one where they took 3 days to cut a few mm down into the granite, why did they not extract the granite block they worked on using the methods they tell us were used? I’ll tell you why: 6 sides to a cube, 3 days for a few mm depth , I don’t really need to do the maths for anyone, do I?
a reply to: moebius

a reply to: moebius

Just a few things I found online (for the interested):

Did you also find out when and who made the structure you're basing your argument on?

a reply to: Kandinsky

While I couldn't find anything about the stone box on Elephantine Island, I did come across some references to similar objects. Here go some illustrations from Description de l'Egypte, a work published in 1809 as a result of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt:

Source

Source


And an almost identical object can be found inside the sanctuary of Edfu Temple:

Photo: Nguyen-Anh Le/Discopalace

Source

All of the above doesn't exclude the possibility of a later replica of said object, but it would suggest that similar monolithic boxes were already built around 237 to 57 BCE when Edfu Temple is said to have been constructed.

a reply to: jeep3r

Good man, thanks for taking the time and making the effort. I'll have a good look tomorrow.

originally posted by: bluesfreak
Being a machinist, I know full well what a jig is. Are there any AE art that depicts these jigs you mention? If you read my previous posts I have talked about this already. Do you think they used a jig to keep saw blades on correct course or do you think it was done manually with no guides? a reply to: Harte

Congratulations. Former ME here.
Personally, I think jigs may have been used to get cuts started and try to ensure a bore is true. But maybe not when trueness wasn't a big factor.
Stocks carved out a starter groove for his tube drills to seat in.
Jigs aren't shown in artworks depicting stone sawing as far as I'm aware, but I do know that there's a lot of depictions of stone cutting, polishing and drilling that you'd have to do a serious search to find, and you probably wouldn't find many even then. You'd have to read about them. A depiction of a worker ripping a plank from a hunk of wood seems to show some kind of guide (possibly) on the top of the log. That's on a few websites as a drawing of the art.

The idea of a jig is so simple compared to many of the other things they did that it's hard for me to believe they didn't use them at all.

The capstone on top of the drill is a sort of jig in fact, so it's not like the idea is way out there or anything.

However, Stocks manufactured a stone vase without any jigs, and it looked pretty good.

Starting with experimental drills on page 150 then going on to the actual manufacture of a vase further down.
Made admittedly from softer stone because it was for proof of concept, not proof of time frame.

Harte

originally posted by: jeep3r
a reply to: Kandinsky

While I couldn't find anything about the stone box on Elephantine Island, I did come across some references to similar objects. Here go some illustrations from Description de l'Egypte, a work published in 1809 as a result of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt:

Source

Source


And an almost identical object can be found inside the sanctuary of Edfu Temple:

Photo: Nguyen-Anh Le/Discopalace

Source

All of the above doesn't exclude the possibility of a later replica of said object, but it would suggest that similar monolithic boxes were already built around 237 to 57 BCE when Edfu Temple is said to have been constructed.

Excellent, excellent work - so you've shown that it is could be ancient but more probably, Middle or New or Late period - therefore the classical eras. Edfu was built in the Ptolemaic Kingdom between 237 and 57 BC

This bringing it up into the eras where iron was available. I would suspect that later Islamic minbars were based on that design.

Edited to add a note: Iron objects appear very sporadically since Naqada III* in Egypt. In Egypt iron comes into common usage only from about 500 BC.

en.wikipedia.org...

^Naqada III was a culture in Egypt that is dated to circa 3,150, so iron in small quantities was known. Tut had an iron knife too, circa 1332–1323 BC and an iron plate was found on the outside of G1 but I believe that is now thought to be medieval iron.

originally posted by: Harte

originally posted by: bluesfreak
Being a machinist, I know full well what a jig is. Are there any AE art that depicts these jigs you mention? If you read my previous posts I have talked about this already. Do you think they used a jig to keep saw blades on correct course or do you think it was done manually with no guides? a reply to: Harte

Congratulations. Former ME here.
Personally, I think jigs may have been used to get cuts started and try to ensure a bore is true. But maybe not when trueness wasn't a big factor.
Stocks carved out a starter groove for his tube drills to seat in.
Jigs aren't shown in artworks depicting stone sawing as far as I'm aware, but I do know that there's a lot of depictions of stone cutting, polishing and drilling that you'd have to do a serious search to find, and you probably wouldn't find many even then. You'd have to read about them. A depiction of a worker ripping a plank from a hunk of wood seems to show some kind of guide (possibly) on the top of the log. That's on a few websites as a drawing of the art.

The idea of a jig is so simple compared to many of the other things they did that it's hard for me to believe they didn't use them at all.

The capstone on top of the drill is a sort of jig in fact, so it's not like the idea is way out there or anything.

However, Stocks manufactured a stone vase without any jigs, and it looked pretty good.

Starting with experimental drills on page 150 then going on to the actual manufacture of a vase further down.
Made admittedly from softer stone because it was for proof of concept, not proof of time frame.

Harte

Time frame - I believe that the AE spent years on the largest objects - I mean when your customer is a God-King resources and time are not an obstacle. It took Michelangelo two years to make David and he had iron tools and expertise.

Excellent work, im very impressed , and even more beautiful work to look at. May I echo the sentiment of thanking you for taking time to research this and post- can’t figure out why I can’t post pics at moment but will add things that piqued my interest when I figure it out. Thanks again, very appreciated.a reply to: jeep3r

a reply to: bluesfreak

I've cut a bunch of granite and marble with a wet saw it works pretty good with power tools, water, electricity and all that. I couldn't imagine using rounded stones and bronze tools on that # I would quit the first day.

Also, I find it interesting that the same suspects are here parroting the same bull# narratives as usual. not even surprised

Hey Harte , I wasn’t trying to be a smart a** or shut anyone down by saying I work on machines, it’s the very reason some of these AE objects interest me! Im not trying to discredit academia or anything either, there is just some large scale work that really ask some questions.
I agree with what you have said about jigs, and being intrinsic to the work as a given.
However regarding these boxes being discussed ;you must agree show the resultant edges left by a saw blade larger than the boxes themselves it’s surely staring you in the face. As a former ME, me and you both know you could make this box on a mill using, say, aluminium for instance , surely? You know what you’d have to do to replicate the geometry. If you look at these boxes as a milling machine operator all those resultant edges and geometric symmetry seem to look machined to me . I don’t have any answers , I just don’t know!
If it WAS the case that they could machine it somehow with large rotating saws etc doesn’t that just make them even cleverer than we thought?! Which surely must be a good thing for Egyptology?
Am I missing something?!?!?!! - a reply to: Harte

Very interesting indeed Hanslune, thanks for the info on iron dating. Awesome. a reply to: Hanslune

originally posted by: toysforadults
a reply to: bluesfreak

I've cut a bunch of granite and marble with a wet saw it works pretty good with power tools, water, electricity and all that. I couldn't imagine using rounded stones and bronze tools on that # I would quit the first day.

Also, I find it interesting that the same suspects are here parroting the same bull# narratives as usual. not even surprised

Yep reality is never cool enough to be popular

a reply to: Hanslune
And that was in marble.

Harte