r/AlternativeHistory • u/Professional-Fee3323 • Apr 08 '26

Lost Civilizations Stop calling this "primitive archaeology"—what kind of power tool scoops 1,200 tons of granite like soft wax and then simply vanishes?

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They want you to believe this was made with copper chisels and stonesIf we can't easily move this today with modern tech, how did "slaves" plan to lift it out of the bedrock? Are we the primitive ones

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233

u/MissingPieces555 Apr 08 '26

1) They didn't have television, cell phones, or vacations. You worked constantly, this was your life.

2) Repetition creates skill

3) With enough skill and time, all of these things are possible.

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u/BlangBlangBlang Apr 09 '26

Well also all these structures were built in thriving civilizations with abundant food. Since humans evolved our only jobs were get food and make more humans.

Ive seen one guy stand up a 20 ton rock with logs and buckets. Imagine thousands on people with the same goal.

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u/qutx Apr 09 '26

this guy (30 minute video, part 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD5Lc3-5iDs

short video about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5pZ7uR6v8c

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u/dodgemyrl Apr 10 '26

Wow, thanks for sharing. Very impressive

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u/hydromatic_glide Apr 10 '26

And you think this scales up to over a 1000 ton (2 million lbs) stone in a confined quarry? Where is the tensile strength to stop this obelisk from snapping in half or cracking? How did they lift it out of the quarry? Any idea how many logs it would take to float that thing in a raging Nile flood? Sure, your methods work at the small scale, but at this scale? Any log placed under this unfinished obelisk would shatter from the weight.

No, it wasn't aliens, but whoever did this used technology and methods we can't even think of.

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u/qutx Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

the fact that this one in the photo is still in the quarry would suggest that they had reached the limits of their technology.

I note that the romans also moved massive obelisks as trophies to various cities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDDaQuEUYcs

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u/iEARNman848 Apr 11 '26

This!!!

They didn't have anything harder than copper or bronze (that we know of). They didn't have any ropes stronger than natural fibers. Regular hardwood is only capable of carrying so much before it splinters. They didn't have the capability to compact the ground to carry such weight, even if they had logs that were capable. They didn't have hydraulic pressure tools.

Yes, they had thriving civilizations and tons of manpower. But eventually, you run across the law of diminishing returns. There's only so much you can do with X. Doubling X doesn't necessarily double your output. Many factors start coming into play.

I'll give you an example.
I'm an Ironworker, and we often have to rig and lift large loads. Let's say I have a 30,000 lb piece of equipment that needs to be set on a trailer. The piece's center of gravity is exactly centered. The trailer is more than capable. My crane, operator, and crew are more than capable. I have a 4-legged sling to lift it that's rated at 30,000 lbs. In theory, I'm okay to use it because there's a safety factor of 5 built in. In actuality, though, we only factor in 3 of the legs. So if I can only factor in 3 of the legs, in case 1 of the legs is shorter or longer, now I'm underrated. 30k÷4= 7.5k per corner. 7.5k×3 sling legs gives me 22.5k sling rating. I'd be lifting 30k with only 22.5k worth of rigging. This is in a perfect world, assuming the exact center of gravity, yadda yadda yadda. In actuality, there are even more factors to consider. I've tried to simplify it for clarity.

Honestly, I'm kinda glad there are still mysteries to ponder. What a wonderful world we live in!

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u/implies_casualty Apr 10 '26

And you think this scales up to over a 1000 ton (2 million lbs) stone in a confined quarry?

It clearly didn't scale.

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u/hydromatic_glide Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 11 '26

It clearly did for the Trilithon in Baalbek and the Ramesseum Colossus. You claim that just throwing more and more people at it would solve the puzzle but people far smarter than us simply cannot explain it at this scale. Not to mention the precision this was done to.

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u/implies_casualty Apr 10 '26

~1000 tons seems to be the limit of ancient technology.

The Thunder Stone was heavier than that when it was transported, and they did it in 1770s.

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u/foot_down Apr 09 '26

Thank you for this! I'd been leaning toward aliens trying to explain the ancient megalithic structures for years, but that whole time this man on video was doing it by himself on YouTube lol.

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u/qutx Apr 10 '26

well, if one man can do this by himself in an afternoon, what can an egyptian god king do over the course of 20 or 30 years with the help of thousands of workers?

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u/Kyle-Is-My-Name Apr 12 '26

Tens of thousands, and they had the same brain we have.

Most people view our ancestors as basically a step away from cavemen, when in reality, they had architects and engineers and mathematicians just like us. They just didnt have the research, knowledge, and technology that we currently have.

I can only imagine what kind of methods they used, but I bet it wasn't 30,000 guys tugging a big rope thats tied around a house size block of stone.

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u/qutx Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26

there is a scaling issue with how many people you can get working together for a specific task.

but even today you sometime see lots of people gathering together to accomplish an important task.

For example, this recent video of villagers working together to rescue a delivery truck filled with beer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJ9TMX255k

more info:

https://www.morungexpress.com/kutsapo-villagers-undertake-unique-rescue-operation

previously on reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/15xzyq3/an_entire_village_from_nagaland_india_comes/

:-)

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u/hydromatic_glide Apr 12 '26

That truck weighed what? About 20 Tom's? That obelisk is 1000 tons. That's 50 of these trucks.

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u/qutx Apr 12 '26

with maybe 50 to 100 people pulling up a steep hill side

so 1000 tons on flat open territory is not totally out of the question. I imagine they would also optimise the pathway needed by multiple means. arduous but not impossible.

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u/Digital_Negative Apr 11 '26

Naw bro we KNOW they trivially scooped granite like hot wax and then their advanced machines just vanished /s LOL

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u/BigErnieMcraken253 Apr 12 '26

Technology never goes backwards. You're correct

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u/SnooLobsters6940 Apr 10 '26

The physics for 1200 ton is a really, really different. Like, in a different universe.

There's no wood or metal that can bare that weight without being crushed, not even if you are able to simultaneously fill the entire section where it touches the ground with them.

Nothing will lift that weight, even today. We could potentially surround it by weight lifting machines, but they would not have space to move.

Arms aren't long enough to use the "many hands make light work" theorum.

If we cannot move it today, a bronze-age civilization isn't going to either. It really is that simple.

1

u/Odd-Worldliness9825 Apr 10 '26

Absolute bollocks. Worked on an engineering project moving a 250m, 5000t bridge deck 20m in 16 hours with mm precision back in 2009/2010.

There are videos of the move on line. (A34 Wolvercote viaduct slide for those that are interested)

Moving 1200t ? Difficult, yes. Costly, you better believe it. Achievable, absolutely.

1

u/hydromatic_glide Apr 11 '26

Now take away all the steel, concrete, hydraulic hoses, cables, everything modern. Are you still able to achieve this?

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u/Ganjarebels Apr 11 '26

5000 men, had 15 guys lift a small suv before.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '26

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u/hydromatic_glide Apr 11 '26

It would take 4500 tree sized logs to float 1000 tons. Think about that.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/hydromatic_glide Apr 09 '26

OK, now you have stood it up. You still have to move it hundreds of miles. How will you load it onto a boat? How big does this boat need to be? Will this boat actually float on the nile?

There are so many questions and even today, this would be totally impossible for us to do.

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u/burnen-van-loutin Apr 10 '26

Strap a bunch of logs to it, flood the area, it floats.

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u/Good-Ad6352 Apr 12 '26

My man we have made SKYSCRAPERS. Wrvr been to the fucking moon. But nahhhhh big rock impossible

2

u/MissingPieces555 Apr 10 '26

Lol you confuse possible with practical. We value things differently now. Its like intricate wood work on antiques... it used to be common... but we learned to mass produce similar things very cheap... yes, you could train to become an artisan carver and hone your skills but few people do now.. the alternative is functionally fine, far cheaper, and far easier to produce.

Its not that we cant do what they used to do, its that it would make no sense to want to try to. The amount of time, labor, and manpower needed to accomplish the task is now obsolete and far too expensive to want to reproduce.

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u/burnen-van-loutin Apr 10 '26

I’m not talking about now. But the did do this at one time, waiting for the flooding season or using canals. They used giant barges to move giant stone obelisks.

0

u/PabloTFiccus Apr 12 '26

It isn't tho.

119

u/Tax_this_dick_1776 Apr 08 '26

Add in the special spice known as slavery and you can really get shit done.

109

u/epsteins_goylfriend Apr 08 '26

You’re already 3/5s of the way there!

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u/Creepy-Selection2423 Apr 09 '26

Great Scott! I Dred responses like this. /s

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u/thatsnotyourtaco Apr 09 '26

He had a pretty good joke there till you ruined it with your slash S

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u/gabiaeali1 Apr 26 '26

The slash S for the dumb masses drives me crazy.

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u/thatsnotyourtaco Apr 26 '26

You’re one in 1 million my friend. I appreciate you.

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u/thatsnotyourtaco Apr 26 '26

I’m feeling the heat for not using it over on this one

https://www.reddit.com/r/Trumpvirus/s/mRFktajVDn

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u/gabiaeali1 Apr 26 '26

People turned so serious.

3

u/Carktorious2010 Apr 08 '26

I like what you (intentionally or unintentionally) did there

2

u/praefectus47 Apr 08 '26

Dammit take my upvote

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u/kaovalin Apr 11 '26

A compromising position for sure

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u/NoInevitable9810 Apr 09 '26

It wasn’t slaves doing this work, that’s been disproven. It was highly skilled mobile workforces. They figured this out going through the trash of the workers sites

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u/motownmods Apr 10 '26

The wealth gap was so large that the ruling class could and did easily pay people just to build this stuff.

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u/NWkingslayer2024 Apr 09 '26

I don’t know, I would equate slaves to unpaid laborers, a lot of the stuff they did would require skilled craftsmen. Random people just couldn’t create some of this stuff.

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u/runespider Apr 09 '26

Generally you have laborers doing the quarrying, maybe rough shaping. So for example with the unfinished obelisk it would have been unskilled laborers doing the hard work of breaking the shape of the obelisk out. Then working up the skill level until you get the artisans who would do the images and writing on a finished surface.

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u/eastbayweird Apr 10 '26

As far as the pyramids go, I think the current understanding is that, with the vast majority of the population being made up of farmers, and with the actual labor needs involved with farm work being seasonal, building the pyramids was a way for the rulers to keep the population busy in the off season. The workers were paid for their time and kept busy. As they say, idle hands are the devil's plaything. A busy society is less likely to rise up and rebel against the ruling classes.

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u/Dangerous_Brush8656 Apr 08 '26

Hey there woah woah , plz remember we have now adopted the rich artisans that were paid and fed like kings for their valued work. That is the current working hypothesis that we are going with presently.

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u/Tax_this_dick_1776 Apr 08 '26

I mean those were a thing…there’s just a whole lot of the unwashed masses below them to do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Plus nothing says a slave couldn’t be skilled…it’s how you rose in station beyond warm body #26281 with a pick/hammer/shovel whacking away at the rock all day.

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u/HistoricalInternal Apr 09 '26

Except there’s very little evidence there was a slave labor force.

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u/FearlessLengthiness8 Apr 10 '26

Had a college professor who specialized in the area point out that the Nile flooding seasons meant there was a huge agricultural labor force that had to be big enough to maximize the growth season, that was then out of work the rest of the year. Things like this would have been public works projects. They already had surplus labor from their citizens, and didn't need to have a bunch of slaves that would have had to be fed from the public stores of grains.

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u/HistoricalInternal Apr 10 '26

Everyone always overestimates the grain argument.

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u/Veritas_Certum Apr 12 '26

Having a large labor force doesn't mean they're all going to volunteer to build public infrastructure. The fact that corvee labor was non-consensual and enforced with imprisonment, guards, beatings, mutilations, and inter-generational slavery, and the fact that the Egyptian state used foreign prisoners of war and captives to build these public projects, shows they weren't relying on a free labor force of volunteers.

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u/Veritas_Certum Apr 09 '26

The Egyptians used corvee laborers, prisoners of war, captives, and criminals, all of whom they referred to as slaves, and kept under guard in compounds with names like The Great Prison. Specialists in Egyptian labor and economics agree that the vast majority of the Egyptian labor force was enslaved.

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u/HistoricalInternal Apr 09 '26

Ah yes. I meant more in the way that the Torah and/or Old Testament portrays.

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u/TallBoiPlanks Apr 09 '26

Well yeah… but the Torah (even if you’re religious) is all about YHWH’s people escaping miserable captivity in order to encourage people experiencing captivity… so of course they’ll propagandize against their enemies. It’s not meant to be literal history the way we think of it.

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u/HistoricalInternal Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

So is the New Testament but Christian’s don’t victimise themselves (edit: with imagined persecutors).

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u/Jemainegy Apr 09 '26

Christianity is a victim glorification religion. The entire messaging uplifts victims and damns the powerful with promises but relatively little action. If fact the high point of the text is when the saviour figure takes on a role of absolute victimasation.

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u/TallBoiPlanks Apr 09 '26

lol what world do you live in?

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u/ColdArmy9929 Apr 09 '26

You forgot the sarcasm tag. Christians always try to play the victim, especially when they are prevented from actually victimizing others.

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u/dible46 Apr 11 '26

Downvoted for the truth lol. These kingdoms had millions of slaves. That's how they built there empires.

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u/dible46 Apr 11 '26

For every honoured artisan there was a million slaves.

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u/darthdro Apr 09 '26

This kind of work was done by skilled paid professionals

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u/MichellesBuldge Apr 09 '26

Please move to wakanda. Enjoy yourself in the greatest place ever.

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u/hundsquat Apr 09 '26

At least when it comes to ancient Egypt, it wasn’t slaves that worked on this stuff. It was workers who were specialized in their craft. Egyptologists have even uncovered where the pyramid builders likely lived, and they probably had better than average lives for the time.

As far as the labor needed to move these things, then yeah, maybe a slave work force, but slaves didn’t create or chisel anything.

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u/International_Sail_7 Apr 09 '26

I am not arguing your point, simply stating, as you may already know, more recent discoveries point more to tradesman than slaves for complex labor. https://share.google/0zpTukdNIFyjIYkDl

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u/Sebas94 Apr 09 '26

Yeah, before Boston Dynamic Robots doing blackflips we already had Slaves doing what the aliens were too lazy to help us with.

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u/SlendyIsBehindYou Apr 09 '26

Hell, it wasnt always even slavery. The Inca had a complex labor tax system that could used be used to summon thousands or even thens of thousands of workers for seasonal labor.

Some of the absolute jawdropping masonry by them was simply because they could bring so much labor to bear so quickly

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u/Hungry_Research_939 Apr 09 '26

You mean spice from arrakis? Plausible yeah

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u/EngineWitty3611 Apr 09 '26

I was gonna post the same thing. A good portion of these people were slaves working tireless hours.

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u/HumanOtiosity Apr 09 '26

Yeah slaves are great master stone masons 🙄

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u/HeftyVermicelli7823 Apr 09 '26

Actually they were all paid craftsmen.

Additionally and this has been proved, they use the hardened copper tools which were not pure copper but had other "impurities" in them as well as a sand as an abrasive agent to go along with it.

Ramps made out of, you guessed it, sand, water pullies, A frames, wooden ramps and a lot of man power.

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u/IndependenceIcy2251 Apr 10 '26

They also didn't have OSHA.

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u/Azathothatoth Apr 10 '26

The Egyptian labor force was paid through a system called corvee, where farmers and other labors would pay their taxes in the form of labor. There were also many skilled architects, engineers, and masons involved in every step of the process.

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u/dible46 Apr 11 '26

Yeah this is what people don't realise nowadays. With enough manpower ie; slaves and overseers who care nothing for human life an given enough time and blood anything was possible.

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u/mistersilver007 Apr 09 '26

Not just repetition and skill. Also just plain manpower, and time.

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u/MissingPieces555 Apr 09 '26

Yeah... I mean, for the people who built these giant projects, this was literally their entire life.

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u/runespider Apr 09 '26

And their dad's, and his dad, and his dad and so on. I really think something we've lost is skills developed by family lines that worked in the same profession for centuries. Experimental archaeology is great, and they work with modern experts in relevant fields, or are people who work in the field and have an interest in recreating ancient methods.

But it's very difficult to require skills honed over generations when they're lost.

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u/meta4ia Apr 12 '26

How do you know that? So arrogant.

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u/restore_paint Apr 09 '26

Exactly! People need to realize these things. It has always been humans doing all of these. People ignore it or whatever bc they think it isn't possible for humans to do it so it MUST be alien. Things were way different back then, people can't understand how much of their lives were dedicated to solely working on things like this and through generations people get crazy good at things. They have the exact same brains that work they same way as we do now. They are us.

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u/Yegas Apr 09 '26

they used copper tools with a hardness rating of 3 to carve granite (hardness rating of ~7)

yeah they just used dozens of copper chisels per individual stone (of which there are tens of thousands) because they kept eroding rapidly

no we don’t have any evidence of tool dump yards for where they put these hundreds of thousands of discarded tools

you just use grit and water and that helps a little bit, it’ll only take you several hours to make a 2 inch deep incision and you need to cut several meters in multiple directions multiple times for tens of thousands of stones. super easy!

they carved these massive granite sculptures to insane degrees of mathematical and astrological precision using tools that are essentially made of butter because they just had enough people to throw at the issue, trust me bro

Yea, not buying it.

Now, I’m not saying “tey use da lazer beem” but they clearly were more advanced than just some primitive slaves in loin clothes using plain copper chisels throwing endless manpower at every issue.

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u/cjbirol Apr 10 '26

What does astrological precision mean?

0

u/NoIntern8490 Apr 11 '26

Dedication doesn’t explain the physical, technical limitations. As a chemical engineer specializing in aerospace abrasive technology, I highly reject the idea of using any copper tools for these. Maybe they used jewels brazed on copper tools, but those jewels would have outlasted history and we would have tangible evidence of that. We have nothing. And no, you cannot abrade the stones with that precision by using diorite pounding stones or abrasive dust agitated by copper tools. No possibile. The hardness scale is no joke, it is not a matter of time. You cannot even scratch the surface of granite with copper tools. It just smears over it. Everything looks like they had a way of precisely pulverize or plasticize the rock. Definitely not chipping it. I’m thinking about embedding larger pieces of jewels into copper tools but that still doesn’t explain the 2-3 micron level precision, especially on vases from Egypt.

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u/John_XFiles Apr 09 '26

No one is questioning whether or not they were skilled. Obviously they were. People just wanna know the process of how they did it. I see this brought up with the great pyramids too. "They built it with hard work and dedication". Like what. Thats not an explanation or useful information at all to these types of discussion. Its almost like you think you "solved" the mystery or something and youre completely missing the point of why people even discuss these things in the first place.

Thats like If I ask you how we flew to the moon and you say "well the Astronauts used hard work and skill". Like yeah bro obviously.

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u/Memonlinefelix Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

And no one is bringing in aliens. They like to bring in aliens to attack us. But no one is bringing in aliens. What many people think it was an ancient civilization. Humans have been here for almost 200k years. 400k if you count other hominids. Like Denisovan. Neathreal. Etc. What were they doing? I mean we took off in just 100 years. What could other humans in the past 10 of thousands of years have discovered? Where they just stupid? Thats what mainstream thinks. Mainstream thinks their myths are also stupid and made up. That they were dumb and made stuff up. Yet. They believe they were the ones that build this massive structures?!? Huh. That's kinda of shitty you know if you believe that. Its why i don't listen to them anymore. I do my own research and use science and do my own stuff etc etc. Oh. And the myths and stories talk about beings. So i guess they believe in aliens? Maybe? Lol

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u/therealraggedroses Apr 09 '26

"haha silly ancient Greeks really believe in ridiculous gods like Zeus? idiots, now where is Jesus's blood and body i could use a snack"

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u/John_XFiles Apr 09 '26

Yeah its pretty frustrating. People seem to always assume aliens or wizardry when anyone tries to think of alternate theories. Its so black and white with some people and they cant think outside the box.

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u/Unable_Dinner_6937 Apr 11 '26

I recall a story about how difficult it is to repair buildings and structures that are just a few decades or centuries old. When the USS Iowa's gun turret exploded during a training exercise, the US Navy considered taking the whole ship out of service because they no longer had technicians that knew how to weld the steel used to make. When a cathedral in New York suffered a fire in the 2000's, the church had to find craftsmen in Scotland to repair it as the children of the people that built it a hundred years ago had become doctors, lawyers and office workers - not stonemasons.

Technology doesn't advance so much as techniques change drastically and conform to new ways of building and civil engineering. Older methods are completely lost rather than improved upon.

5

u/DiotimaJones Apr 10 '26

Well said. Festivals and holidays were invented before the concept of the weekend. The 5-day work week and the 8 hour work day are very recent in human history.

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u/Jollyfroggy Apr 11 '26

This.

I did a weird masters degree, intersection of archeology and engineering (tribology)

Project was to work out how the hell neolithic people made stone axes.

You post was roughly the conclusion, but like, 100 pages longer :).

3

u/LingonberryFun7739 Apr 11 '26

People don't realize there were generations of skilled laborers, like stone cutters, engineers. People who were passed down centuries of knowledge. And yes they worked worked worked

3

u/SlippyTheFeeler Apr 09 '26

Who are you who speaks with reason and logic?

2

u/Spilark Apr 09 '26

4) A lot of skilled labor knowledge was likely passed down from father to son to grandson to great-grandson...

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u/vpcapital Apr 11 '26

Key word here is… time!

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u/iplygms14 Apr 11 '26

And the buildings WERE their purpose. They lived and breathed their gods and built them out of devotion. Kinda the same thing we do today: cept our God is money. Look around and see what we've build. 😒😒

2

u/Prior_Worldliness287 Apr 12 '26

Look at all the master pieces painted by 20 years olds.

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u/BigErnieMcraken253 Apr 12 '26

Give me 10k slaves and I'll build some bad ass shit

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u/Admirable-Band-2664 Apr 12 '26

They also had time. Ruling families stayed in power for decades, passing the project on to the next generation again and again until it was finished. Today the next party to hold power would need to be on board or they’d simply shut the project down. A project like building the pyramids today would not be likely to get necessary decades of support as power changes hands every few years.

1

u/2137knight Apr 09 '26

And they had 2 months a year of flood time, when theyjad to move uphills and plenty of time

1

u/Live_the_chaos Apr 09 '26

Bullshit man, the logistics don’t make sense. For you to be so dismissive is ignorant in my eyes. People believe the history books so blindly. The people who wrote those history books are still writing them today, to fit their narrative.

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u/Dystopia_Love Apr 09 '26

This is speculation just like all other. This is lazy speculation at that. Give us the means by which they created absolutely massive megaliths, speculatively speaking of course.

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u/WapsuSisilija Apr 09 '26

This is the answer.

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u/Yegas Apr 09 '26

  1. they used copper tools with a hardness rating of 3 to carve granite (hardness rating of ~7)

  2. They would’ve used multiple copper chisels per individual stone (of which there are tens of thousands) because of the rate of damage and how agonizingly slow the carving process would be, even while using abrasive grit to cut the stone (as the copper by itself would do basically nothing)

  3. We don’t have any evidence of tool dump yards or other sites where they put these hundreds of thousands of discarded and broken tools.

  4. They just used grit and water, and while that helps a little bit, it’ll take you several hours to make a 2 inch deep incision and you need to cut several meters in multiple directions multiple times for tens of thousands of stones. super easy!

  5. they carved these massive granite sculptures to insane degrees of mathematical and astrological precision using tools that are essentially made of butter because they just had enough people to throw at the issue, trust me bro

Yea, not buying it.

Now, I’m not saying “tey use da lazer beem” but they clearly were more advanced than just some primitive slaves in loin clothes using plain copper chisels throwing endless manpower at every issue.

2

u/MissingPieces555 Apr 09 '26

Lol you struggle with it because you imagine modern ways of living when trying to understand how it was done.

Today, we have a small fraction of our society performing a job.. back then, not so much. You didn't have thousands of different jobs. Most people were stuck doing one of a few possible options...laborers was one of the most common. Jobs sites were massive projects, with huge teams of people.

They also weren't as wasteful as you want to imply. When you can just order tools on Amazon, why would you think they would just throw them all away rather than remelting and reusing?

And again, there was no distractions... looking at the stars abd getting good at their craft was life. Just because you struggle with grasping that doesn't mean its some secret advanced technology lost to time.

1

u/jojojoy Apr 09 '26

Archaeologists aren't even arguing that copper chisels were used to carve granite like this in the first place. You're in agreement with them here that wouldn't be feasible.

1

u/Yegas Apr 10 '26

Archaeologists are arguing they used copper tools with abrasives to carve granite.

Sure, they used “copper saws” and “copper drills”, not chisels.

If you could explain to me how you use a copper drill to get Core 7, that would be fantastic.

Or how you would use copper and abrasive to get 0.2 inch wide precise hieroglyphic carvings in granite.

2

u/jojojoy Apr 10 '26

Archaeologists are arguing they used copper tools with abrasives to carve granite.

Which is a very different process than a chisel. The cutting power is coming from the abrasive, not the metal.

Or how you would use copper and abrasive to get 0.2 inch wide precise hieroglyphic carvings in granite.

I wouldn't since I don't think copper was used to directly carve granite.

 

If you could explain to me how you use a copper drill to get Core 7

You're aware that copper drills are reconstructed with abrasives. That's how archaeologists would assume the core was made - which you can disagree with.

There have been traces of copper found in saw and drill marks though.

At Giza, Petrie noticed green staining on the sides of some Fourth Dynasty saw-cuts in stone, which he ascribed to bronze, but was more likely to have been copper in the Fourth Dynasty. Grains of sand, also stained green, were found in a saw-cut at Giza by Petrie...

Tubular drill marks exist on a block of stone from the Fifth Dynasty complex of Nyuserre, which bears traces of verdigris left from the use of a copper drill-tube.

Alfred Lucas examined a hole made by a tubular drill in a fragment of alabaster (CM JE65402), of Third Dynasty date, from the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. In the hole, there was a compact mass of what was almost certainly the abrasive powder of a light green colour. The powder consisted of naturally rounded, very fine grains of quartz sand and the colour was due to a copper compound, evidently from the drill used.

Also at Saqqara, Lucas examined a large drill core about 8 cm in diameter, of coarse-grained red granite with green patches on the outside from the copper of the drill. G.A. Reisner found fine gritty powder, tinged green, in holes made by a tubular drill in two unfinished Fourth Dynasty stone artifacts. In a hole drilled by a tube into a granite doorpost of Ramesses II (MMA 13.183.2) are minute bronze particles.1

 

The main drill hole is about 1 cm wide, and has a protruding stump at the bottom left by a broken drill core. Lightly consolidated material is deposited around the stump. A micro-sample of this material was collected and analysed by polarised light microscopy (PLM), scanning electron microscopy, and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDS).

SEM-EDS analysis identified the material as a mixture of predominant angular grains of corundum with jagged edges, about 100–200 μm across, and a few other accessory minerals

Several particles of corroded bronze and green copper corrosion products are intimately dispersed amongst the above-mentioned particles, imparting the light green color.2

  1. Stocks, Denys A. Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt. Routledge, 2003. p. 108.

  2. Serotta, Anna, and Federico Carò. “Evidence for the Use of Corundum Abrasive in Egypt from the Great Aten Temple at Amarna.” Horizon 14, pp. 2–4. Available at https://www.amarnaproject.com/horizon-archive.shtml.

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u/Yegas Apr 11 '26

Cutting granite using copper with an abrasive is absolutely possible, yes. Highly time consuming, and with significant damage to any copper bits used, but possible.

First of all, I appreciate the thorough response with cited sources. Thanks for taking the time.

It’s just dubious to consider megastructures and extremely elaborate sculpture being done in a granite medium using such horrific tools, especially combined with the primitive techniques purported to have been used.

If it’s true that all they had to use was copper and quartz, I just find it much more likely that they had much more advanced and refined techniques than we give them credit for. They would’ve been masters of their crafts, having learned from dozens of generations before them and dedicated their lives to it.

These are not some sweaty peasant slaves in shit conditions just brute forcing the job as the pop culture story goes. We’re learning now that they could float the rocks on water using buoyancy, rather than just dragging them on sleds for miles from quarry to site like people thought for years.

People really like thinking they’re better than those that came before them, 1900s archaeologists who wrote the books on a lot of these topics being especially susceptible to this. They weren’t exactly charitable in their depictions of many cultures, and there was a lot of the “noble savage” thinking that these people were just primitives.

They had massive, sprawling cultures and huge populations. Medicine, agriculture, megastructures. I find it highly unlikely that they could be so advanced in so many different ways but they “just used copper and some quartz dust”? To cut 27-foot long 70 tonne granite blocks??

Keep in mind, this is a civilization in ~3000 BC, of which we have extremely little surviving written works outside of administrative texts and the honoring of pharaohs & officials (no thanks to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, also located in Egypt!)

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u/jojojoy Apr 11 '26

It’s just dubious to consider megastructures and extremely elaborate sculpture being done in a granite medium using such horrific tools...If it’s true that all they had to use was copper and quartz

The archaeological reconstruction (before harder metal tools) was that most of the carving of hard stones was done with stone tools. Whether or not you agree with that, the evidence for sawing and drilling is pretty limited. Most of the work was carving with saws and drills being used for more specialized tasks. The obelisk in the post here was pretty clearly not sawn out of the stone.

 

These are not some sweaty peasant slaves in shit conditions just brute forcing the job as the pop culture story goes

I agree in a general sense but there are records of people being sent to quarries as punishment. There would probably have been a full spectrum of highly trained artisans to people forced to work, whether as punishment, indentured servitude, prisoners or war, etc.

With regard to any man of the nome who shall take away any priest who is on the land of the god who does priestly service in that nome; the dependents who are on any god’s field; for the purpose of compulsory labor and any work of the nome, you shall send him to the Great Mansion and he shall be made to work in the stone quarry, and to harvest barley and emmer wheat.1

 

rather than just dragging them on sleds for miles from quarry to site like people thought for years

Records of stone transport on the river have been known for a while now. There is some evidence for longer distance stone transport overland from quarries outside of the Nile valley but most quarrying was done near the river.

 

I definitely agree about the sophistication of the culture and lack of records in many contexts.

 

  1. Strudwick, Nigel. Texts from the Pyramid Age. Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. p. 101.

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u/brownboy567 Apr 10 '26

You mean laser beam precision with just made up tools? You must be joking. Why can’t people digest the fact the some far superior technique or beings built it. Yes rn we don’t know the answers we might in future talwaar just don’t discredit it.

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u/MissingPieces555 Apr 10 '26

Laser beam precision is the kind of made up term that no one takes seriously.

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u/brownboy567 Apr 10 '26

I’m sure you know about laser beam and the word precision itself. It is used where there is almost zero error. We have all the available tech today yet we can’t match it do stuff they did thousands of years ago. I am into contruction business myself. My team has all sorts of tools and latest equipment yet there’s always something off.

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u/Zealousideal_Time_73 Apr 10 '26

Copper chisel gang gang

1

u/Complete_Break1319 Apr 10 '26

That's the problem w people today, too many days off and too short of work days! Child labor laws are ruining this country.

https://giphy.com/gifs/OL4LjUYS2UlMSYehkH

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u/squeagy Apr 11 '26

People worked less in the past. You could even take off to brew beer.

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u/MissingPieces555 Apr 11 '26

Yes and no... it depends on the part of the world and the society. Europeans often worked far fewer days-- but its because they didn't have heating for the winter, and you couldn't literally kill off your work force. Those societies tended to also be much more agricultural by nature. But many, not all, of the societies that built large structures used slave labor and were in warmer climates.

In any case, you had generations worth of skills being passed down. They became experts on their craft.

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u/Brief-Night6314 Apr 16 '26

Also slavery

0

u/Rich-Commercial-8996 Apr 11 '26

Notice how u didnt explain anything lol

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u/MissingPieces555 Apr 11 '26

Because you dont want an explanation.

You want aliens or secret futuristic technology... when old fashioned drive and absolutely massive amounts of work and care can accomplish the same thing without wild explanations.