Page 322 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

skill and experience. It seemed, moreover, as Flinders Petrie admitted
with some puzzlement after completing his painstaking survey of the
Great Pyramid, that these craftsmen had access to tools ‘such as we
ourselves have only now reinvented ...’
9
Petrie examined the sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that
it must have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with straight
saws ‘8 feet or more in length’. Since the granite was extremely hard, he
could only assume that these saws must have had bronze blades (the
hardest metal then supposedly available) inset with ‘cutting points’ made
of even harder jewels: ‘The character of the work would certainly seem to
point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only the considerations
of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this
conclusion ...’
10
An even bigger mystery surrounded the hollowing out of the
sarcophagus, obviously a far more difficult enterprise than separating it
from a block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians must
have:

adapted their sawing principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form, curving
the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a circular groove by its rotation;
thus by breaking away the cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out
large holes with a minimum of labour. These tubular drills varied from 1/4 inch to
5 inches diameter, and from 1/30 to 1/5 inch thick ...
11
Of course, as Petrie admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever
been found by Egyptologists. The visible evidence of the kinds of
12
drilling and sawing that had been done, however, compelled him to infer
that such instruments must have existed. He became especially
interested in this and extended his study to include not only the King’s
Chamber sarcophagus but many other granite artefacts and granite ‘drill
cores’ which he collected at Giza. The deeper his research, however, the
more puzzling the stone-cutting technology of the Ancient Egyptians
became:
The amount of pressure, shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws
pierced through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load of at least a
ton or two was placed on the 4-inch drills cutting in granite. On the granite core
No 7 the spiral of the cut sinks 1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, a rate of
ploughing out which is astonishing ... These rapid spiral grooves cannot be
ascribed to anything but the descent of the drill into the granite under enormous
pressure ...
13
Wasn’t it peculiar that at the supposed dawn of human civilization, more
than 4500 years ago, the Ancient Egyptians had acquired what sounded

9 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 103.
10 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 74.
Ibid., p. 76.
11
12 Ibid., p. 78.
13 Ibid.

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