The Egyptian Stone Carving Article
The little stones vases curved of some of the hardest stones known such as gneiss, granite and diorite, beautifuly designed with narrow nicks and hollowed in the center, the thing is, today we require a heavy duty machine work such as diamond drills and saws drills and the other methods Like laser cuts, so if we can only replicate this stone work today using this heavy machinery ! how did they do it 2800 BC.
All of our modern techniques were of course not available for the ancient builders, the wheel had not yet been invented and the iron related tools was still undiscovered, yet many of these small perfectly aligned vases are fully symmetric.
These mysterious stone vases are very hard to hollow up today with our modern techniques, so one have to wonder what sort of tools or technique the ancient builders used to have such an amazing results with their stone carving work, and the fact that it dates back as early as the first Egyptian dynasty is something truly mysterious and can not be accounted for.
The stones used to produce these vases are also used for some of the other statues of Egypt and it almost redefines modern technology and there’s a hard index of 10 like diamond, but these stones are harder than steel files !? the Egyptians are suppose to have had only copper tools to work these stones and shape them up ! this is difficult enough and almost unimaginable as far as the sculpture is concerned when we come to hollowing out stone vases with these hard materials like granite it’s really unheard of.
These mysterious vases are now housed in prominent museums such as the Louvre, the British museum and the Petrie museum, and While metal chisels could be used to shape soft limestone, the metals was available to the ancient Egyptians were copper, bronze and during the first millennium BCE wrought iron, were far too soft to work igneous rock. Hard stone vessels were given their form by pounding them with hammer stones ( See Drawing 1 & 2 ) made of stone harder than the work piece itself.