Speaker 1: Imagine for just a second that you're sitting down at
a table with this beautifully cooked, thick, perfectly marbled steak
right in front of you.
Speaker 2: Okay, sounds pretty good so far.
Speaker 1: Right. You're starving, you're ready to dig in, and you
reach for your utensils, but all you have is one
of those flimsy, white plastic spoons from a cheap takeout place.
Speaker 2: Oh no, that's not going to end well exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could push the back of that spoon
into the meat. You could try, you know, sawing back
and forth with that dull plastic edge.
Speaker 2: You'd honestly spend hours doing that, sweating, frustrated, and.
Speaker 1: Ultimately the meat is going to win. You're just going
to end up with this absolute mangled mess on your plate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it would be an exercise in pure mechanical futility
because the hardness and the well the capability of your
tool simply doesn't match the physical requirements.
Speaker 1: Of the task, and that exact feeling of futility, that's
fundamental mismatch between the tool and the task is what
we're looking at today. You know, scaled up to the
size of.
Speaker 2: A mountain, it's a massive discrepancy.
Speaker 1: It really is welcome to thrilling threads. Today, we are
tracking down the missing tools of the ancient builders, a.
Speaker 2: True ancient cold case exactly.
Speaker 1: And to do this we're pulling for this fascinating stack
of sources. We've got the historical journals of the nineteenth
century archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie and deep dive analyzes by
historian Debbie.
Speaker 2: Challis, plus the modern engineering test from precision machinist Chris Dunn.
Speaker 1: Right, and the hands on reality checks of master stonecutter
Roger Hopkins. So we're putting all these perspectives together to
investigate what really happened.
Speaker 2: And it truly is a cold case, because if you
look at the bigger picture, the sheer volume of evidence
is just it's overwhelming. We know absolutely that these monuments exist.
Speaker 1: I mean you can walk right up and touch the megalists.
Speaker 2: Exactly, but the physical instruments required to actually build them,
the tools needed to craft those colossal statues to an
incredibly high order.
Speaker 1: Of precision, or to shape those massive igneous stone boxes
to modern day engineering tolerances.
Speaker 2: Right, they seem to be entirely absent from the archaeological record.
The core friction here is that the spectacular, hyper precise
output of the ancient Egyptians simply does not match the
primitive tools were told they had.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't add up. So to understand this mystery,
we have to completely shift our perspective. We usually look
up at the pyramids, but today we need to look
down into the dirt, down.
Speaker 2: At the manufacturing process itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, through the eyes of someone who actually bothered to
search for it, which requires a trip back to the
late nineteenth century to look at Sir Flinders Petrie.
Speaker 2: And historian Wi Challis provides some incredible insight into his
unique mindset here, because you have to remember the context
of nineteenth century archaeology.
Speaker 1: It was basically the wild West, right.
Speaker 2: It really was. I mean a lot of Petries contemporaries
were essentially just high end treasure hunters. They were obsessed with,
you know, finding gold masks, opening pristine tombs.
Speaker 1: Hauling the biggest, glamorous statues back to your museums exactly.
Speaker 2: But Petrie he had completely different obsession. He was scouring
the Egyptian sands looking for the smallest items.
Speaker 1: Because he was an engineer at heart. He wasn't just
interested in the final products sitting on a pedestal somewhere.
Speaker 2: He wanted the nuts and bolts right.
Speaker 1: He wanted to know the step by step mechanics of
how the society actually functioned.
Speaker 2: And according to Challis, he was fascinated by their technical achievements.
He was constantly asking these manufacturing questions like how did
they cut this, what was the kinetic motion used?
Speaker 1: How did the tools evolve? And because he was looking
where the treasure hunters weren't, he started finding physical artifacts
that violently argue against the accepted historical narrative, artifacts.
Speaker 2: That completely defy the idea of a simple primitive society.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to one of his most mind bending fines.
And wasn't a giant obelisk or a golden chariot. It
was this tiny fragment of a bowl made out of diarite.
Speaker 2: Ah, Yes, the diorite bowl.
Speaker 1: We need to talk about the physics of diarite for
a second, because that word gets thrown around in museums
like all the time without any real context.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people just read the placard and move on.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Diarite is an incredibly dense, unforgiving igneous rock on
the most scale of mineral hardness. It sits right up
there around a six.
Speaker 2: Or seven, which is huge because for context, copper, which
is what the Egyptian supposedly use for all their tools,
is only about a three.
Speaker 1: Right, You cannot casually whittle away a diarrite.
Speaker 2: You really can't. In fact, ancient civilizations often use diarite
to make anvils because it can take just an unbelievable
amount of punishment without breaking.
Speaker 1: So the fact that they made a bowl out of
it is impressive enough on its own. But the anomaly
is the specific marking Petri found on this.
Speaker 2: Fragment, the lave mark.
Speaker 1: Yes, when you examine this incredibly hard material closely, you
find a literal lay the mark on it, and a
lath mark completely changes the technological conversation.
Speaker 2: It absolutely does, because when you or I think of
ancient carving, we picture a guy sitting cross legged in
the dust with a chisel and a mallet, just chipping away.
Speaker 1: But a lath isn't a hand tool. A lath that
implies a mechanized system.
Speaker 2: You need an axis.
Speaker 1: Right, to get a lay mark. You have to take
your piece of raw material mounted perfectly on an axis,
spin it at a high consistent rotational velocity and then
apply a fixed cutting.
Speaker 2: Tool, a tool that is fundamentally harder than the material
being spun. It implies mechanized symmetrical precision and.
Speaker 1: A deep understanding of rotational physics and material science. You
don't accidentally leave a lays mark on one of the
hardest rocks on Earth.
Speaker 2: No, it's very deliberate.
Speaker 1: It's honestly like digging down into a geological stratum for
millions of years before the wheel was invented and finding
a perfect treaded tire track baked into the mud.
Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it. It just completely
upends our timeline of technological evolution, it really does.
Speaker 1: But finding a manufacturing mark on a bowl is one thing.
Petrie didn't stop there.
Speaker 2: No, he eventually stumbled upon an actual tool of creation,
the physical instrument used to make the deep holes in
these megalithic.
Speaker 1: Blocks, and he found it inside the Great Pyramid at Giza,
of all places, which is just incredible.
Speaker 2: When you look at the physical artifact Challice analyzed in
her writings, it completely defies the primitive narrative. It's a
tugular drill made.
Speaker 1: Of granite, but it isn't just a hollowed out crude
rock used to mash away at other rocks.
Speaker 2: Now, the geometry of this thing is what gives it away.
It's carefully curved and it actually tapers at the cutting end.
Speaker 1: The taper is such a brilliant piece of engineering.
Speaker 2: It's essential. If you're drilling a deep hole into solid
rock with a straight tube, the friction against the sides
of the hole is eventually going to cause the tool
to bind and seize up.
Speaker 1: It's just going to get stuck, exactly.
Speaker 2: But by tapering the drill, you reduce the surface area
dragging against the wall of the hole, which dramatically reduces
the friction.
Speaker 1: That implies the makers understood the physics of deep hole boring.
Speaker 2: They absolutely did. But the most staggering feature of this
granite drill is the grooving.
Speaker 1: Oh the spiral lines.
Speaker 2: Yes, as you examine the cutting surface, you find very fine,
continuous lines spiraling around the tool. We're talking about parallel
lines that are literally a couple of millimeters apart.
Speaker 1: Going perfectly all the way around without any waves or wobbles.
Speaker 2: Right, And this is where we have to talk about
the concept of feed rate.
Speaker 1: The feed rate because The distance between those spiraling grooves
tells us how deeply the drill was biting into the
granite with every single revolution.
Speaker 2: Precisely, If the grooves are two millimeters apart, it means
the drill was plunging two millimeters into solid granite every
time it turned three hundred and sixty degrees.
Speaker 1: Which is insane. To force a cutting edge into igneous
rock at that speed requires an immense amount of downward
pressure and massive torque.
Speaker 2: Patrey recognized this immediately. He kept returning to this single
artifact throughout his life, trying to reverse engineer it in his.
Speaker 1: Mind, because he knew the crystalline hardness of the stone
they were cutting right.
Speaker 2: So his logical deduction, the only way he could make
the physics work in his head to account for those
perfectly parallel millimeter space grooves, was that they must have
used diamonds or at least some.
Speaker 1: Kind of equivalent jewel set into a metal tool.
Speaker 2: Exactly, something hard enough to bite into granite with that
kind of astonishing aggression.
Speaker 1: Okay, but I have to jump in here and push
back heavily on Patriots diamond theory. Go for it, because
when I hear diamonds being used for industrial scale construction,
the physics of wear and tear immediately come to mind.
Speaker 2: Oh, sure they break down, right.
Speaker 1: Diamonds are incredibly hard, yes, but they also have cleavage planes.
If you subject them to immense impact and friction while
grinding through thousands of tons of solid.
Speaker 2: Granite to build an entire civilization's infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Exactly, they're going to fracture, they're going to dull, and
they'll wear out. So did they just grind millions of
diamonds down to absolute dust or.
Speaker 2: Were they so valuable that they eventually traded every single
one of them away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly the right critical lens to apply. You're
looking for the mechanism of disappearance, like why is there
no footprint?
Speaker 2: And that glaring historical reality is what completely sank Petrie's
theory because he never discovered a single diamond in ancient Egypt.
Not a fractured chart, not one, not a worn down
nub in a royal treasury, not one embedded in a
tomb wall. They are entirely absent from the archaeological record
of that era.
Speaker 1: So if they didn't have diamond tipped hole saws, what
mechanism could possibly bite into stone like that.
Speaker 2: Well, the total absence of diamonds forces us into a corner.
We can't rely on imaginary tools. We have to evaluate
the tools the Egyptologists tell us they supposedly did have.
Speaker 1: And the accepted mainstream historical theory is that the Egyptians
achieved all of this megalithic architecture with the most basic
materials imaginable.
Speaker 2: We're talking about soft copper tubes, loose courtz sand acting
as an abrasive slurry, and vast unimaginable amounts of human
time and labor.
Speaker 1: Since the physical evidence of diamonds doesn't exist, we have
to test that accepted theory of copper and sand. But
you can't test that just by thinking about it in
the library.
Speaker 2: Now, you need someone who understands the physical realities of
machining and material removal to actually try it.
Speaker 1: And that's where modern machinist Chris Dunn comes in. I
love is approach because he decided to subject himself to
the exact process that historians claim built the pyramids.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Dunn went to his workshop and physically built the
egyptologist's theory. He created a crank operated copper tube drill and.
Speaker 1: To give the ancient theory every possible advantage. He didn't
even use regular quartz sand diddy.
Speaker 2: No, he loaded his drill up with silicon carbide, which
is a highly aggressive modern abrasive, and a slurry of water,
and he went to work on a solid piece of granite.
Speaker 1: Let's quickly explain how an abrasive drill actually works for
a second, because the copper tube itself isn't cutting the rock.
Speaker 2: Right, The copper is just the carrier exactly.
Speaker 1: It pushes the abrasive sand crystals against the rock, and
as you spin the tube, those little jagged crystals roll around.
They violently grind, scratch, and crush the rock beneath them.
Speaker 2: It is a messy, chaotic, friction based process, and an
agonizing one. Dunn spent hours turning this crank, physically grinding
this copper tube and silicon carbide into the granite.
Speaker 1: Just hours of manual labor.
Speaker 2: Yes, he subjected himself to immense physical exertion just to
get deep enough to finally pop out a single core
of stone, one little cylinder of modern abrasive drilled rock.
Speaker 1: But the sweat equity wasn't really the point of the experiment.
He needed that modern core so he could take the
scientific community into the inspection lab.
Speaker 2: Right the microscopic showdown, which is just fascinating, it really is.
On one side of the lab he has the core
he just made using the accepted historical mechanics, and on
the other side he brings in a highly accurate LATEX
cast of the ancient core that Petrie found, the.
Speaker 1: One sitting in the Peatrie Museum.
Speaker 2: Yes, and he compares them side by side, microscopic groove
by micro scopic groove, and.
Speaker 1: The difference between the two is what Chris Dunn refers
to as a literal smoking gun. It's night and day
because when you look at Dunn's modern core under the microscope,
the surface is exactly what the physics of an abrasive
slurry dictate. It looks chaotic.
Speaker 2: The striations, the scratch marks left behind by the rolling
pieces of silicon carbide are completely messy.
Speaker 1: There's shallow, they overlap randomly, and there's absolutely no distinctive
feed rate. This looks like a rock that has been
violently randomly rubbed away.
Speaker 2: Now contrast that chaotic surface with the cast of the
ancient core from the Peaching Museum under the microscope, you
see something fundamentally different.
Speaker 1: The stridations on the ancient artifact are incredibly clean.
Speaker 2: Clean, uniform, and quite deep. They do not look like
the random scratches of rolling sand, not at all. They
show a fixed tool biting into the rock with distinct, powerful,
organized pressure.
Speaker 1: It's like comparing a blurry, muddy footprint left in a
puddle to a high resolution laser scanned photograph.
Speaker 2: That's the perfect analogy. One is the chaotic result of friction,
the other is engineered mechanical precision.
Speaker 1: It is physical, undeniable proof that the ancient methods were
entirely different and vastly superior to just rubbing soft copper
and sand together for a few decades.
Speaker 2: The micro evidence completely dismantles the macro theory, and this
leads to an even more staggering realization, which is, well,
if they're drilling technology was secretly disadvanced on a small scale,
what happens when we scale up? What happens when we
look at how they finished massive, completely flat services.
Speaker 1: Right, we have to move from a tiny drill corp
to something colossal. We have to talk about the serapim
of Sokora.
Speaker 2: The serapim is a deeply mysterious subterranean necropolis in Egypt,
supposedly around three thousand years old.
Speaker 1: It's this massive network of dark, tight tunnels right yes,
holding absolutely gigantic solid granite and basalt boxes. Some of
these boxes way up to one hundred tons.
Speaker 2: One hundred tons underground exactly.
Speaker 1: And Chris Dunn, bringing his precision machinist background to bear,
decided to take his modern inspection tools down into this
ancient environment.
Speaker 2: He didn't just walk in with a tape measure, no, no, he.
Speaker 1: Brought a tool called an inspection surface plate.
Speaker 2: And for those who aren't in the machining world, a
surface plate is a solid piece of material, usually granite
or cast iron, that has been ground perfectly flat in
a temperature controlled labratory.
Speaker 1: It is the absolute gold standard used to test how
perfectly flat an other surfaces.
Speaker 2: And Done's specific gauge was ground to a tolerance of
within two ten thousands of.
Speaker 1: An inch two ten thousands.
Speaker 2: To visualize that, it's roughly one tenth the thickness of
a single human hair. It is a tool of extreme,
uncompromising modern industrial precisions. So Dunn takes this modern marvel
of flatness. He goes deep underground into the dark tunnels
of the Serapium, and he places his gauge against the
massive inside vertical surfaces of these giant granite books.
Speaker 1: And the physical reality of what he finds is just astonishing.
When he placed his gauge against the granite, he found
that the inside surfaces of these massive, thousands of years
old stone boxes were perfectly flat to within two thousands
of an.
Speaker 2: Inch, which is almost incomprehensible.
Speaker 1: He noted that if you took a single standard piece
of paper and slipped it under one edge of his
precision blade, the tolerance of the stone was so impossibly
tight that the microscopic lift of the paper would actually
cause light from his flashlight to leak through the gap.
Speaker 2: Two thousands of an inch over massive, multi ton slabs
of granite in a dark, subterranean tunnel where you barely
have room to move, let alone operate giant machinery.
Speaker 1: It's wild.
Speaker 2: As Done pointed out, those kinds of tolerances simply do
not appear by accident. You do not rub a rock
with sand and accidentally achieve a surface perfectly flat to
a fraction of a human hair.
Speaker 1: No, you definitely do it.
Speaker 2: Was astounding to him to walk into an ancient facility
and find the exact same kind of precision that he
actively strives for and struggles to achieve in a modern
computer controlled machine shop.
Speaker 1: It completely shorts out your brain when you try to
visualize the mechanics of doing that by hand.
Speaker 2: It really does.
Speaker 1: And to really ground this in human reality, the sources
bring in Roger Hopkins. He's a master stonecutter with forty
years of hands on commercial experience in.
Speaker 2: The business, so he knows exactly how stone behaves when
it is struck.
Speaker 1: Yes, and he provides a vital reality check regarding the
materials supposedly used.
Speaker 2: Because he acknowledges that ancient people knew how to harden
copper through cold hammering right repeatedly striking the metal to
alter its crystalline structure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but he emphasizes the physics of the interaction. Even
heavily work hardened copper will not make a dent in
rocks like basalt or granite.
Speaker 2: The atomic bonds in the quartz crystals of the granite
are simply stronger than the bonds in the copper.
Speaker 1: Exactly if you hit a granite block with a copper
chisel all day. You're just gonna bend and blunt your chisel.
It's useless.
Speaker 2: So if the copper tools are physically use, what does
a historical establishment say they use to hollow out these
hundred ton boxes and achieve hairwith flatness.
Speaker 1: Well, some historians suggest that the ancients just sat there
with little loose shards of quartz and literally scratched away
at the granite, just scratching, just scratching and dragging and scraping,
day after day, year after year, for generations.
Speaker 2: The sheer human toll of that theory is staggering when
you actually think about the logistics. It assumes that an
entire society was willing to devote decades, perhaps entire human
lifetimes of unbearable, mind numbing physical labor, just to hollow
out a single.
Speaker 1: Box by scratching it with a rock, and.
Speaker 2: Then to do it perfectly flat.
Speaker 1: You can almost see the smoke coming out of Hopkins's
head when he confronts that theory. You have this real
life master stonecutter looking at the ancient work in the serapeum,
and his reaction is incredibly raw.
Speaker 2: What did he say?
Speaker 1: He stated that if a client came into his modern
shop today and asked him to replicate just one of
those granite by hand using primitive scraping methods. He wouldn't
do it for any amount of money.
Speaker 2: Any amount of money, wow.
Speaker 1: He flat out refused. He said it would be a
complete waste of a human life to attempt something that
laborious without advanced mechanized technology.
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate testimony from the field. A man
with four decades of literal stone cutting experience telling you
that the accepted historical narrative is practically speaking impossible for
a human being to execute.
Speaker 1: It brings us right back to the central theme.
Speaker 2: Right the physics demand that they must have had some
sort of advanced technology, some mechanized high torque technique that
entirely escapes our modern understanding of their era.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us today? It
leaves us with this incredible, almost uncomfortable friction between what
we physically observe and what the history books claim.
Speaker 2: We're looking at modern day hairwith precision carved into three
thousand year old granite.
Speaker 1: We're looking at the deep, uniform, microscopic bite marks of
high speed mechanized drill. But when we look in the
museums for the tools that made those marks. All we
are finding is rudimentary copper and a pile of sand.
Speaker 2: The physical evidence of the action is everywhere, baked into
the stone itself, but the instrument of the action has
vanished completely from the earth.
Speaker 1: We know the tools must have been equal to the task.
You cannot build the serapeum with the equivalent of a
plastic spoon, but the tools, they're just gone.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate mystery, it really is.
Speaker 1: Which brings me to a question for you listening right now.
I want you to really put yourself in the sandals
of an ancient master builder. If you possessed mechanized technology
capable of two thousands of an inch precision, what did
you do with those tools when the massive jobs were
finally done.
Speaker 2: Were they made of a material that was eventually melted
down and repurposed for war.
Speaker 1: Or were they intentionally hidden away in a subtranean chamber
we simply haven't found yet. Or is it possible they
belong to someone else entirely, someone who packed up their
highly advanced tools and took them with them when they left.
Speaker 2: That's a fascinating thought.
Speaker 1: Wonder that mechanical mystery. Let us know where you stand.
Drop a comment below and share your theories on where
the tools went. We would love to read your thoughts.
Thanks for joining us on this deep dive into the
engineering mysteries of the past, right here on Thrilling Threads.