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Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt
2. Several important areas of ancient technology remain shrouded in mystery, particularly those concerned with stoneworking: our ability to assess the development of ancient Egyptian technology, despite finding many tools, artifacts and tomb illustrations of manufacturing processes, is frustrated by an incomplete knowledge of important crafts, and virtually no knowledge at all of significant tools missing from the archaeological record.
2. We do not know, with reasonable certainty, how particular materials were worked in any given situation: tools’ cutting and wear rates need to be established for a range of materials. The precise construction and use of the stone vessel drilling and boring tool is only partly perceived, and none of the New Kingdom period mass-production equipment for drilling stone beads, a development of the single bead drill, has survived. Only some illustrations in six New Kingdom tombs3 at Thebes indicate the existence of an important and systematic drilling procedure. The constructional methods and tools for making sarcophagi and statuary in hard stone, the close fitting of the stone blocks used for architecture, the source of the frit and the faience core and glaze materials, and the cutting of incised and low reliefs, and of hieroglyphs, in hard and soft stone are also incompletely understood.
19. Some tools have been located by archaeologists at different sites in Egypt, but various tool marks on artifacts, together with tomb depictions of working techniques, indicate that key industrial tools are unknown.
19. 19. Tomb artists never recorded certain important techniques, one of them being the manufacture of the sarcophagus from a single block of stone. Furthermore, all of the functions of the tools we do possess may not be known, obscuring our understanding of ancient technology. This lack of information of manufacturing methods also conceals the manner in which ancient workers organized their work.
