Within the past three years, artefacts established as icons of ancient Egyptian study have developed a new aura. There are suggestions of controversy, cover-ups and conspiracy to squelch or ignore data that promises to shatter conventional academic thinking regarding prehistoric society. As of this writing, a powerful movement is intent on restoring to the world a heritage that has been partly destroyed and undeniably misunderstood. This movement consists of specialists in various fields who, in the face of fierce opposition from Egyptologists, are cooperating with each other to affect changes in our beliefs of prehistory.

The opposition by Egyptologists is like the last gasp of a dying man. In the face of expert analysis they are striving to protect their cosy tenures by arguing engineering subtleties that make no sense whatever. In a recent interview, an Egyptologist ridiculed theorists, who present different view of the pyramids, claiming their ideas are the product of overactive imaginations stimulated by the consumption of beer.

By way of challenging such conventional theories, there has been, for decades, an undercurrent of speculation that the pyramid builders were highly advanced in their technology. Attempts to build pyramids using the orthodox methods theorised for the ancient Egyptians, have fallen pitifully short.

The Great Pyramid is 483 feet high and houses seventy-ton pieces of granite lifted to a level of 175 feet. Theorists have struggled with stones weighing up to two tons to a height of a few feet. One wonders if these were attempts to prove that primitive methods are capable of building the Egyptian pyramids or the opposite? Attempts to execute such conventional theories have not revealed the theories to be correct! Do we need to revise the theory, or will we continue to educate our young with erroneous data?

In August 1984 this author published an article in Analog Magazine entitled “Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt?” based on The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, by Sir William Flinders Petrie, published in 1883. Since that article’s publication, I have been fortunate to visit Egypt twice. With each visit I leave with more respect for the industry of the ancient pyramid builders. An industry, by the way, that does not exist anywhere in the world today.

In 1986, I visited the Cairo museum and gave a copy of my article, and a business card, to the director. He thanked me kindly, then threw my offering into a drawer with other sundry stuff, and turned away. Another Egyptologist led me to the “tool room” to educate me in the methods of the ancient masons by showing me a few cases that housed primitive copper tools.

I asked my host about the cutting of granite, as this was the focus of my article. He explained how a slot was cut in the granite and wooden wedges, soaked with water, were inserted. The wood swelled creating pressure that split the rock. This still did not explain how copper implements were able to cut granite, but he was so enthusiastic with his dissertation, I chose not to interrupt.

I was musing over a statement made by Egyptologist Dr. I.E.S. Edwards in “Ancient Egypt” (National Geographic Society, Washington, 1978). Edwards said that to cut the granite, “axes and chisels were made of copper hardened by hammering.”

This is like saying “to cut this aluminium saucepan they fashioned their knives out of butter!”

My host animatedly walked me over to a nearby travel agent encouraging me to buy plane tickets to Aswan, “where” he said, “the evidence is clear. I must see the quarry marks there and the unfinished obelisk.” Dutifully, I bought the tickets and arrived at Aswan the next day.

The Aswan quarries were educational. The obelisk weighs approximately 3,000 tons. However, the quarry marks I saw there did not satisfy me as being the only means by which the pyramid builders quarried their rock. Located in the channel, which runs the length of the obelisk, is a large hole drilled into the bedrock hillside, measuring approximately 12 inches in diameter and three feet deep. The hole was drilled at an angle with the top intruding into the channel space. The ancients must have used drills to remove material from the perimeter of the obelisk, knocked out the webs between the holes and then removed the cusps.

While strolling around the Giza Plateau later, I started to question the quarry marks at Aswan even more. (I also questioned why the Egyptologist had deemed it necessary to buy a plane ticket to look at them.) I was to the south of the second pyramid when I found an abundance of quarry marks of similar nature. The granite casing stones, which had sheathed the second pyramid, were stripped off and lying around the base in various stages of destruction. Typical to all of the granite stones worked on were the same quarry marks that I had seen at Aswan earlier in the week.

This discovery confirmed my suspicion of the validity of Egyptologists’ theories on the ancient pyramid builders’ quarrying methods. If these quarry marks distinctively identify the people who created the pyramids, why would they engage in such a tremendous amount of extremely difficult work only to destroy their work after having completed it? It seems, to me, that these kinds of quarry marks were from a later period of time and were created by people who were interested only in obtaining granite. Without caring from where they got it.

You can see demonstrations of primitive stone cutting in Egypt if you go to Saqqara. Being alerted to the presence of tourists, workers will start chipping away at limestone blocks. It doesn’t surprise me that they choose limestone for their demonstration, for it is a soft sedimentary rock and can be easily worked. However, you won’t find any workers ploughing through granite, an extremely hard, igneous rock made up of feldspar and quartz. Any attempt at creating granite, diorite and basalt artefacts on the same scale as the ancients, but using primitive methods, would meet with utter and complete failure.

Those Egyptologists who know that work-hardened copper will not cut granite have dreamed up a different method. They propose that the ancients used small round diorite balls (another extremely hard igneous rock) with which they “bashed” the granite.

How could anyone who has been to Egypt and seen the wonderful intricately detailed hieroglyphs cut with amazing precision in granite and diorite statues, that tower 15 ft. above an average man, propose that this work was done by bashing the granite with a round ball? The hieroglyphs are amazingly precise with grooves that are square and deeper than they are wide. They follow precise contours and some have grooves that run parallel to each other with only .030 inch wide wall between the grooves. Sir William Flinders Petrie remarked that the grooves could only have been cut with a special tool that was capable of ploughing cleanly through the granite without splintering the rock. Bashing with small balls never entered Petrie’s mind. But then, Petrie was a surveyor whose father was an engineer. Failing to come up with a method that would satisfy the evidence, Petrie had to leave the subject open.

We would be hard pressed to produce many of these artefacts today, even using our advanced methods of manufacturing. The tools displayed as instruments for the creation of these incredible artefacts are physically incapable of even coming close to reproducing many of the artefacts in question. Along with the enormous task of quarrying, cutting and erecting the Great Pyramid and its neighbours, thousands of tons of hard igneous rock, such as granite and diorite, were carved with extreme proficiency and accuracy. After standing in awe before these engineering marvels and then being shown a paltry collection of copper implements in the tool case at the Cairo Museum, one comes away with a sense of frustration, futility and wonder.

The world’s first Egyptologist, Sir William Flinders Petrie recognised that these tools were insufficient. He admitted it in his book The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh and expressed amazement and stupefaction regarding the methods the ancient Egyptians were using to cut hard igneous rocks, crediting them with methods that “...we are only now coming to understand.” So why do modern Egyptologists identify this work with a few primitive copper instruments and small round balls? It makes no sense whatsoever!

While browsing through the Cairo Museum, I found evidence of lathe turning on a large scale. A sarcophagus lid had distinctive indications. Its radius terminated with a blend radius at shoulders on both ends. The tool marks near these corner radii are the same as those I have witnessed on objects that have an intermittent cut.

Petrie also studied the sawing methods of the pyramid builders. He concluded that their saws must have been at least nine feet long. Again, there are subtle indications on the artefacts Petrie was studying of modern sawing methods. The sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid has saw marks on the north end that are identical to saw marks I’ve seen on modern granite artefacts.

The artefacts representing tubular drilling, studied by Petrie, are the most clearly astounding and conclusive evidence yet presented to identify, with little doubt, the knowledge and technology in existence in pre-history. The ancient pyramid builders used a technique for drilling holes that is commonly known as “trepanning.” This technique leaves a central core and is an efficient means of hole making. For holes that didn’t go all the way through the material, the craftsmen would reach a desired depth and then break the core out of the hole. It was not just the holes, that Petrie was studying, but the cores cast aside by the masons who had done some trepanning. Regarding tool marks which left a spiral groove on a core taken out of a hole drilled into a piece of granite, he wrote: “The spiral of the cut sinks .100 inch in the circumference of six inches, or one in sixty, a rate of ploughing out of the quartz and feldspar which is astonishing.”

For drilling these holes, there is only one method that satisfies the evidence. Without any thought to the time in history when these artefacts were produced, analysis of the evidence clearly points to ultrasonic machining. This is the method that I proposed in my article in 1984, and so far, no one has been able to disprove it.

In 1994 I sent a copy of the article to Robert Bauval (The Orion Mystery) who then passed it on to Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods). After a series of conversations with Hancock, I was invited to Egypt to participate in a documentary with him, Robert and John Anthony West. On February 22, 1995 at 9:00 am I had my first experience of being ‘on camera’.

This time, with the expressed intent of inspecting features I had identified on my previous trip in 1986, I took some tools with me: a flat ground piece of steel (commonly known as a “parallel” in tool shops, it is about six inches long and a quarter-inch thick with edges ground flat within .0002 inch); an Interapid indicator; a wire contour gauge; a device which forms around shapes; and hard forming wax.

While there, I came across, and was able to measure, some artefacts produced by the ancient pyramid builders that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that highly advanced and sophisticated tools and methods were employed. The first object I checked for close precision was the sarcophagus inside the second (Khafra’s) pyramid on the Giza Plateau. I climbed inside the box, and with a flashlight and the parallel, was astounded to find the surface on the inside of the box perfectly smooth and perfectly flat. Placing the edge of the parallel against the surface I lit my flashlight behind it. There was no light coming through the interface. No matter where I moved the parallel, vertically, horizontally, sliding it along as one would a gauge on a precision surface plate, I couldn’t detect any deviation from a perfectly flat surface. A group of Spanish tourists found it extremely interesting too, and gathered around me as I was becoming quite animated at this point exclaiming into my tape recorder. “Space age precision!”

The tour guides, at this point, were becoming quite animated too. I sensed that they probably didn’t think it was appropriate for a live foreigner to be where they believe a dead Egyptian should go, so, I respectfully removed myself from the sarcophagus and continued my examination on the outside. There were more features of this artefact that I wanted to inspect, of course, but didn’t have the freedom to do so.

My mind was racing as I lowered my frame into the narrow confines of the entrance shaft and climbed to the outside. The inside of a huge granite box finished off to a precision that we reserve for precision surface plates? How did they do this? It would be impossible to do this by hand!

While being extremely impressed with this artefact, I was even more impressed with other artefacts found at another site in the rock tunnels at the temple of Serapeum at Saqqara, the site of the step pyramid and Zoser’s tomb. In these dark dusty tunnels are housed 21 huge basalt boxes. They weigh an estimated 65 tons each and are finished off to the same precision as the sarcophagus in the second pyramid.

The final artefact I inspected was a piece of granite I quite literally stumbled across while strolling around the Giza Plateau later that day. I concluded, after doing a preliminary check of this piece, that the ancient pyramid builders had to have used a machinery that followed precise contours in three axes to guide the tool that created it. Beyond the incredible precision, normal flat surfaces, being simple geometry, may be explained away by simple methods. This piece, though, drives us beyond the question normally pondered...what tools were used to cut it? To a more far reaching question... what guided the cutting tool? These discoveries have more implications for understanding the technology used by the ancient pyramid builders than anything heretofore uncovered.

The interpretation of these artefacts depends on engineers and technologists. When presenting this material to a local engineers club, I was gratified by the response of my peers. They saw the significance. They agreed with the conclusions. While my focus was on the methods used to produce them, some engineers, ignoring Egyptologists proposed uses for these artefacts, asked, “what were they doing with them?” They were utterly and completely astounded by what they saw.

The interpretation and understanding of a civilisations’ level of technology cannot and should not hinge on the preservation of a written record for every technique that they had developed. The “nuts and bolts” of our society do not always make good copy, and a stone mural will more than likely be cut to convey an ideological message, rather than the technique used to inscribe it. Records of the technology developed by our modern civilisation rest in media that is vulnerable and could conceivably cease to exist in the event of a world wide catastrophe, such as a nuclear war, or another ice age. Consequently, after several thousand years, an interpretation of an artisan’s methods may be more accurate than an interpretation of his language. The language of science and technology doesn’t have the same freedom as speech. So even though the tools and machines have not survived the thousands of years since their use, we have to assume, by objective analysis of the evidence, that they did exist.