Egyptian Stoneworking Techniques & Precision Vases - Dan Richards & Hugh Newman - Podcast Clip

While we were in Egypt, first of all, we had the vases, all the vases, you know, the beautifully created pieces. Stone pots. And I've seen them. I didn't see them here, but I've seen them. I've seen them at Matt's. I went to Matt's. I saw them all. I was like, oh, wow. Oh, yeah. That kind of really, really got me because, you know, they were just like, this is quite remote, beautiful. And I've seen a few in a few museums here and there as well. But the technology of that, there's been a big debate about that. I know we know our friend Ben Van Kirkwyk's working on it, Matt, and a few others, Adam Young and others. But there's, you showed me something, the smooth granite, granite kind of surfaces. Stone lapping. Yeah. And that really caught my attention because that isn't public knowledge. That is not really well known. No, it's not well known. It should be, but it's just not. It's, well, stone lapping is you take two pieces of stone and it works really well with things like granite. And they put a quartz and then some water and then they just rub the stones together and they do this for a really long time. And eventually, if you go to a machine shop, they have a precision granite countertop in almost every one of them. And that's how they made it. And if you actually send it in to get repaired, that's what they're going to do to repair it. They'll just sand it back down with another. It's called stone lapping. Y'all can look it up on the internet. It's all over the place. But this is a technique that will explain like precision, mere polished surfaces. And it also, it's why a lot of those archeologists say that, well, you know, they just took some sand to make these faces because they're assuming that they're just measured to ----. And you could hypothetically spin one and then use just this, the same technology, the same technique, put a piece of wood with some grit in there and it just slowly, right. But that wouldn't account for the precision that we see clearly. But yeah, it's the kind of thing that's definitely a game changer as far as like when you look at ancient, ancient stonework. I felt bad. Your friend Greg said immediately, he was just like, oh man, you ruined my weekend. I was like, damn it, sorry man, I wasn't trying to ruin your weekend, bro. It is important to take into account though, I mean, I like to quote AJ from the Y-Files when I talk about that one. And it's like, if you, you know, he says that if we can debunk 95% of things, it's not trying to debunk your favorite thing. It's trying to make that other 5% that much cooler because it really is, if you know, if you've actually tried to solve these things meticulously, the ones that can't be solved actually can't be solved. It's not just, man, I think that was really cool because there's a lot of things like that. The pointing machine is another one where they were able to, did I show you that one yesterday as well? The pointing machine is a technique where they would use to reproduce Greek statues. The Romans did it and you still take the skilled sculptor, but it's basically a three point measuring thing and they'll just take it repeatedly and move it back and forth from one thing to another until they've carved it exactly how they want it. And this is a very low tech solution to why all the Egyptian faces are symmetrical and look the same because you're just scaling the same thing up and down. But it's not to say that that's not, these are techniques that are, one of the things that's really funny about the people, oh, it's a low tech thing, oh, it's so terrible. It's like, well, these are techniques that the Romans didn't, their pointing machine was pretty piss poor. The ones that the Egyptians used had to be pretty, about the ones that were on par with the Renaissance. So it's like, eh, the same thing, even if you take the position of they could make those vases with a primitive lathe, the primitive lathe isn't supposed to have been in Egypt for until like, I want to say like 1600 BC. And so you talk on pre-dynastic times, you're pushing it back at least another 1500 years or so. So all of a sudden this is, even if none of the Wu stuff is right, it's still, this is actually kicking the ball down the court. This is actually changing and hilariously, Ben told me, he's like, yeah, all these guys, they've changed their, they've moved the goalposts. Now it's like, yeah, they had a primitive lathe back then. And it's like, they will never in a million years give any of y'all the credit. They banned, they ain't going to get credit for that. They came up with it.