Page 323 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

like industrial-age drills packing a ton or more of punch and capable of
slicing through hard stones like hot knives through butter?
Petrie could come up with no explanation for this conundrum. Nor was
he able to explain the kind of instrument used to cut hieroglyphs into a
number of diorite bowls with Fourth Dynasty inscriptions which he found
at Giza: ‘The hieroglyphs are incised with a very free-cutting point; they
are not scraped or ground out, but are ploughed through the diorite, with
rough edges to the line ...’
14
This bothered the logical Petrie because he knew that diorite was one of
the hardest stones on earth, far harder even than iron. Yet here it was in
15
Ancient Egypt being cut with incredible power and precision by some as
yet unidentified graving tool:

As the lines are only 1/150 inch wide it is evident that the cutting point must have
been much harder than quartz; and tough enough not to splinter when so fine an
edge was being employed, probably only 1/200 inch wide. Parallel lines are graved
only 1/30 inch apart from centre to centre.
16
In other words, he was envisaging an instrument with a needle-sharp
point of exceptional, unprecedented hardness capable of penetrating and
furrowing diorite with ease, and capable also of withstanding the
enormous pressures required throughout the operation. What sort of
instrument was that? By what means would the pressure have been
applied? How could sufficient accuracy have been maintained to scour
parallel lines at intervals of just 1/30-inch?
At least it was possible to conjure a mental picture of the circular drills
with jewelled teeth which Petrie supposed must have been used to hollow
out the lung’s Chamber sarcophagus. I found, however, that it was not so
easy to do the same for the unknown instrument capable of incising
hieroglyphs into diorite at 2500 BC, at any rate not without assuming the
existence of a far higher level of technology than Egyptologists were
prepared to consider.
Nor was it just a few hieroglyphs or a few diorite bowls. During my
travels in Egypt I had examined many stone vessels—dating back in some
cases to pre-dynastic times—that had been mysteriously hollowed out of
a range of materials such as diorite, basalt, quartz crystal and
metamorphic schist.
17
For example, more than 30,000 such vessels had been found in the
chambers beneath the Third Dynasty Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara.
18
That meant that they were at least as old as Zoser himself (i.e. around
2650 BC ). Theoretically, they could have been even older than that,
19

14 Ibid., pp. 74-5.
15 The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 8.
16 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 75.
The Pyramids: An Enigma Solved, p. 118.
17
18 Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs, Time-Life Books, 1992, p. 51.
19 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.

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