Rethinking the Ancient Egyptian Empire

Rethinking Ancient Egyptian Technology

Precision can be defined as the state or quality of being precise and can be characterized by having a high degree of exactness. Engineers, architects, construction workers, and mathematicians understand the need for precision and apply it to their respective fields. However, consumers can also appreciate precision when putting together a bicycle with the label "some assembly required" on the box, and everything lines up properly. Modern engineers and machinist go to great lengths to ensure that precision is there when necessary. Precision is certainly something we consider modern, and with the industrial revolution and advances in technology precision has become common place in modern society. If we found evidence of modern day precision on a large scale in an ancient culture, should we rethink our understanding of these people or continue to educate young minds with outdated information?

The Ancient Egyptians constructed some of the most awe inspiring structures ever created by human hands and we only have a vague understanding of how they accomplished these things. Modern day engineers, architects, and stone cutters have had difficulty explaining the totality of the work, and have only been able to explain certain aspects with the tools the ancient Egyptians were thought to have possessed. We are taught despite the brilliant feats of engineering, the ancient Egyptians worked with relatively primitive tools such as copper chisels, stone pounders, and crude hammers ("The Egyptian Pyramids"). But when attempting to replicate what the ancient Egyptians accomplished with the tools mentioned modern archeologists have fell considerably short and have not properly addressed how these tools worked the sedimentary rock limestone, as well as some of the hardest igneous stones found on Earth. Scholars believe ancient Egyptians quarried massive granite and diorite stones weighing up to 200 tons and transported these stones up to six hundred miles from the Aswan Quarry without the advantage of pulleys or the wheel ( Department of Anthropology, Loyola University). Yet modern engineers have not been able to explain how massive blocks were transported using only wooden sleds, ropes and mud to ease friction. Ancient Egyptians were known to have a simple form of mathematics, but they constructed some of the most mathematically advanced structures the world has ever known. Is it possible the evidence has been misinterpreted? Are scholars looking at the Ancient Egyptians through their own social and cultural lenses and letting this cloud their judgments? If we take a closer look at the Ancient Egyptians we will find a more advanced culture than at first glance and this is reflected in their advanced geometry, precision stone working, and monumental architectural achievements.

The Great pyramids are some of the most studied structures in the history of mankind and they represent advanced geometry applied on a monumental scale that still inspires wonder in modern day architects, engineers, and mathematicians. So how were they created? The ancient Egyptians revolutionized several fields and developed these ideas without influence from other civilizations despite all the modern theories none have been able to explain the full scope of the work, even though certain Egyptologist claim to have solved the majority of the problems associated with the pyramids. Mark Lehner, a professor of Egyptian archeology from the University of Chicago is considered by the mainstream academic community to be an expert on Egyptian technology and construction methods (Hadingham). Mark Lehner says a workforce of 5,000 men using copper chisels, crude hammers, stone pounders, ropes, and wooden sleds would be sufficient to construct the pyramids in a twenty to thirty year time frame. He arrived at his conclusion by comparing the time it takes modern quarrymen using modern iron tools and winches and calculated his relative number by adding some additional Egyptian workers to make up the difference in technology. He claims that three hundred and forty stones were delivered every day and placed at a rate of one every two minutes or so. But when asked about some of the more precise aspects of the work Lehner dodges the questions. "Okay, how about men cutting the stones and setting them? Well, it's different between the core stones which were set with great slop factor, and the casing stones which were custom cut and set, one to another, with so much accuracy that you can't get a knife blade in between the joints. So there's a difference there. But let's gloss over that for a moment" (Hadingham). Mark Lehner and other Egyptologist avoid questions about the precise geometry cut into the pyramids and do not account for this when developing their theories on how the pyramids were constructed. The true ancient Egyptian pyramids differ from other step pyramids and are the only true pyramids in the world culminating in an apex point. The apex point is where all four sides meet at a point at the top of a pyramid. In the case of the Great Pyramid this point is one hundred and forty six meters high and calls for extreme precision on a large scale and Mark Lehner's theory regarding a sloppy core falls considerably short of describing a massive structure whose four sides meet perfectly at an apex point. The Great Pyramid has been stripped of the outer casing stones and the softer limestone the core has been exposed to thousands of years of erosion making it difficult to understand the exact condition when complete. But we can still extract useful mathematical information from this structure and the Great Pyramid uses a 3-4-5 triangle in its geometry which Pythagoras would develop 2,000 years after the construction of the Great Pyramid. So what if the Great Pyramid was just an anomaly or some kind of geometric accident? The other pyramids of the Giza plateau also exhibit these traits so the ancient Egyptians certainly understood these geometric principles and knew how to apply them on large scales with relative ease (Bryn).

The application of geometric principles is not limited to the Great Pyramids; it seems it had functions in art and religion as well. Christopher Dunn is an engineer and machinist who has done extensive research into ancient Egyptian construction methods and has found evidence of advanced geometry in statues found all over Egypt. "from the perspective of manufacturing and evolution, the Ramses statues contain both two-dimensional surfaces created from straight-line geometry and three-dimensional surfaces created from straight line and circular geometry and go further in complexity to create surfaces that morph precisely between separate and different composite radial geometric shapes" (Dunn). That the ancient Egyptians did this on a grand scale