www.cheops-pyramide.ch Copyright 2006 Franz Löhner and Teresa Zuberbühler Cutting granite with bronze or iron tools? A new method by Franz Löhner
Which stone is suited for splitting?Granite as well as limestone has to be split to obtain stone blocks that can be used for building purposes. Because granite is a crystalline rock and limestone a sedimentary rock the methods to do this differ in details. A quarry stone - and only this kind of stone can be used for a building like the pyramid - is a stone broken or split off. Any stone, that has fine cracks or break lines is unsuitable for building. Suitable is only the healthy stone, the stone which is intact in its natural state of composition and aggregation with its structure the way it was grown. This is the reason why working the stone with the help of fire, heat or cold will not result in a stone that can be used for building. Heat or cold creates fractures and fissures and destroys the inner structure of the stone. To build the pyramids the ancient Egyptians only used building stones made from granite and limestone in perfect condition and that is only a stone which has been split off.
Processing the granite from the quarries in Assuan (Aswan)In the granite quarries in Assuan the stone working was done as follows: Granite grows in layers or sheets (beds). Quarrying takes a keen eye to determine the grain of the rock. The foreman (or rockman) chooses the place where the rock is intact. Then the stone is cleaved from the rock face by driving in wedges. A series of holes is now drilled along the line to be split, using a chisel (not a drill!).
To cut stone in such a way, a man sits on the stone block and three men hit the iron chisel in turns with sledgehammers. After each blow the chisel is turned by an eighth, until the hole is 10 to 15cm deep. A series of these holes is driven along a line which is determined by the quarry master. Now wrought iron wedges are put into all the holes of the line (= splitting holes). They are well lubricated and then driven into the rock between two metal shims (or feathers - narrow at the top and flaring outward so that you can grip them). Each wedge is pounded once, moving down the line in consecutive order. When the wedges are all driven in deep enough, the granite is forced apart, breaks and starts to split along the line of holes. This break - along the so called cleavage plane - is very even and the stone has to be worked only very little to achieve a smooth surface. Sledgehammers used for this kind of work have a special shaft which is more elastic, so it puts less strain on the workers. Granite is found in horizontal beds, between which lie thin sheets of sinter or quartz. This bed has to be split all the way down to the next sheet. Granite has a tendency to rend with comparative readiness and regularity along a plane at right angles to the cleavage. The stone splits along those original bedding planes and very clean and regular stone blocks are produced. This way of splitting has been used by the Romans and also in pre-industrial
quarries in New England until the 18th century [6].
In mines and quarries nowadays the holes are made with widia drills (a
material with the hardness of diamonds) and using a jackhammer, but even
a few decades ago this was still manual work (see English texts about
manufacturing roofing slates [5]). Click on the thumbnail for enlargement (Photos Franz Löhner)
Please notice: A stone block split off with this method
breaks cleanly and regularly and needs very little additional work.
The right tools for splitting and cutting granite
Stone processing with a chisel and a carver's mallet. Tomb of Ankmahor in Saqqara (2200 BC) Entire frieze A stone frieze in Saqqara shows, what kind of tools a stone mason uses
to process (not split) a stone. The frieze shows several
workstations, where statues were obviously manufactured in series.
Comparing with the present-day processing of graniteA comparison with present-day processing of granite shows, that even in modern times granite is processed with difficulties and causing a lot of wear and tear on the tools. Using jackhammers with rotary hammer drills which are carbide tipped, holes are cut along the line where the granite rock should split. Then the holes are filled with explosives, so several thousand tons of blocks can be moved to the side by a few centimeters, forming a crack. Click on the thumbnail for enlargement (Photos Franz Löhner)
Using the process described above, granite blocks can be split into smaller
blocks until they reach the desired size. This can be done down to the
size of a cobblestone. Only the sharp edges have to be dulled with a chisel.
Sawing graniteArcheologists and Egyptologist claim, that granite stones were mainly sawed. One of them, the well known Egyptologist D. Arnold writes in his book about hard rock like alabaster and granite: "Sawing stone not only was carried on until Roman times, but remains the primary method of quarrying and producing stone today" [4]. This assertion is completely wrong. The primary method of quarrying this kind of stone is by splitting. Until scarcely a hundred years ago, sawing and polishing granite was done with great difficulties and using quartz sand and steel. Only since Corundum (a gem with a hardness on Mohs scale of 9) can be synthesized and used as an abrasive, it is economically feasible to saw granite into slaps. This can only be done using pumps and saw blades or circular bands made from the hardest steel but even so, there is a lot of wear and tear! Wikipedia about Corundum / Mohs scale of mineral hardness
Saw blades with diamond or widia tipped teeth or so called diamond wire
(Wikipedia)
are used today to saw granite. The teeth of a widia saw blade have to
be overhauled after about 8-900 hours of use and after 6000 hours they
have to be replaced (costs about 50'000 Euros). A manufacturer writes
about his applications for diamond band saw blades: "Cutting rates
are 6-10 in² (= 9.8-16.4cm² - compare)
per minute for granite with slower rates and lessened band life for higher
quartzite bearing granite."
Origin of Egyptian ironEgyptian iron was mined mostly in Nubia, but in the Old Kingdom (= the time, when the pyramids were built) it was brought from southern Turkey, mainly from the Armenian part, then the kingdom of the Hittites. A trade route ran from the Lebanon (resinous cedar wood for the pyramid tracks), Turkey (iron) via Cyprus (copper), Rhodes, Karpathos, Crete to the estuary of the nile. This route was following the main ocean currents in this area of the Mediterranean.
According to conventional chronology, iron was first smelted about two
thousand years BC. At the beginning iron was inferior to copper, because
it was very brittle. Depending on the composition of the iron ore and
the manufacturing process used, the iron produced in a so called bloomery
can have either a lower or higher carbon content. By controlling the temperature
and ratio of charcoal to iron ore carefully, the iron is kept from absorbing
the carbon and becoming unforgeable. With temperatures of about 900°
and more you only get cast iron which is comparatively brittle. It can
be poured into molds, but it is of no use for forging, so it was probably
not used much. So the so called bloom (or sponge iron) is used. This is highly porous and must later be reheated and beaten with a hammer to drive the slag (= impurities like charcoal ash, parts of the bloomery) out of it. This is done up to 40 times! Iron treated this way is called wrought iron. The rate of yield of iron out of ore is about 6%. Wrought iron is too soft to be made into tools and weapons. Because extra
hardness and strength are needed for knifes, hammer heads or chisels,
iron has to be made into steel first, which is again
a long process. First the iron has to be put into hot coal, then it has
to go through a process of carburization, tempering, annealing and quenching
to become tool steel. In ancient times a smith was responsible for the entire process of iron making. The quality of a steel sword - for example its hardness, elasticity or resilience - was solely owed to the skill and expert knowledge of the smith. At that time there was no known procedure to measure the carbon content of steel, but this is fundamental to its hardness and resilience. This kind of knowledge can only be gathered over many years and several generations of artisans, so of course this knowledge was jealously guarded! If iron is found in strata which archeologists identify as originating from before the iron age, this find is often explained as consisting of iron which was extracted from an iron meteorite. If you consider the elaborate and long process of iron extraction there is no doubt, that this procedure could not have been developed if it could have been tried out only on a few meteorites somebody found by accident! This difficult procedure requires the skill and expert knowledge of generations of smiths. Complex inventions like how to manufacture iron (or the alphabet) usually are not invented several times. Instead of trying to invent everything anew, the invention is copied or a master of his trade is enticed to work for you or the invention is stolen or taken by force. Important metallurgy processes were jealously guarded trade secrets, so probably for some time the Egyptians were only able to buy finished iron tools and didn't yet know how to manufacture them themselves. Sometimes the knowledge that a certain thing can be done is enough to interfere through experiments how it can be done. We differ between blueprint copying and idea diffusion. With blueprint copying you copy or modify an available invention or concept. Idea diffusion happens when a group hears of a certain basic idea or result and have to reinvent the details. But because they know, that it can be done they try it themselves. The resulting solution may or may not resemble that of the first inventor. An example is building of the Russian atomic bomb - did spies steal the technical blue prints of the American atomic bomb or did the Russian scientists realize after Hiroshima, that it was possible to build a atomic bomb and reinvented the principles in an independent crash program? [10]. If an invention shows an evident advantage it spreads fast from its place of origin to other places. The invention of metalworking lead to overexploitation of the forests in the Mediterranean and to eventual desertification of large areas.
Limestone from the quarries in Giza (Giseh) and Tura (Thura)Limestone is much softer and brakes more easily. Because limestone is a sedimentary rock which is laid down in layers called beds, it can be separated into slabs and then split into blocks by driving in wedges. Block making is much faster and only needs a fraction of effort if you do it by splitting. If you want to split a limestone block along a particular line you lift the block up. Now you hit the stone on the narrow side along the line. After no more than 2 minutes the stone block splits exactly along the line and this split is very even. Now the stone has to be worked only very little to achieve a smooth surface.
But if you want to further process the limestone blocks, Franz Löhner doubts, that copper tools are enough. These doubts mainly stem from the fact, that a copper chisel will deform after only a few hits from the impact on the stone, so no precise work is possible.
Five requirements that every pyramid construction theory should fulfillFranz Löhner stipulates that any method or theory for pyramid construction should fulfill the following 5 requirements: 1. A solution that is as simple as possible using a technology that is
as simple as possible (Occam's razor)
A simple solution / method?Does the solution proposed on this page by Franz Löhner also meet those five requirements?
What was found? The historical sources
Because this process was only known to a few smiths, they were the elite
of their profession. To anneal (harden) a point or an edge, a long procedure
is necessary, where the color of the hot glowing iron must be closely
observed. Often a specific temperature or color range gives the best results,
if a certain type of forging task has to be accomplished. This demands
a lot of skill and experience.
More important than discussing this piece of iron is the fact, that granite can't be cut with copper tools and then again, that iron was at that time more valuable than gold! Even in the middle ages iron tools were repaired often and re-used, they never were a disposable product! We have to assume, that iron chisels were so precious, that the tools were given to the stone mason when their working day started and the tools were collected again when they finished their work. The use of iron tools was probably highly regulated and the worker who lost such a valuable tool was in big trouble! Iron tools were remelted and reused and because iron rusts, it is difficult to find much anyway after all those thousands of years! Iron in ancient Egypt: "This is to certify, that the piece of iron found by me near the mouth of the air-passage, in the southern side of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, on Friday, May 26th, was taken out by me from an inner joint, after having removed by blasting the two outer tiers of the stones of the present surface of the Pyramid; and that no joint or opening of any sort was connected with the above-mentioned joint, by which the iron could have been placed in it after the original building of the Pyramid. I also shewed the exact point to Mr. Perring, on Saturday, June 24th." [3] The well known archeologist W. Petrie [9], who also investigated the pyramids said: "That sheet iron was employed we know, from the fragment found by Howard Vyse in the masonry of the south air channel; and though some doubt has been thrown on the piece, merely from its rarity, yet the vouchers for it are very precise; and it has a cast of a nummulite on the rust of it, proving it to have been buried for ages beside a block of nummulitic limestone, and therefore to be certainly ancient. No reasonable doubt can therefore exist about its being really a genuine piece used by the Pyramid masons; and probably such pieces were required to prevent crowbars biting into the stones, and to ease the action of the rollers." This find is controversial, even with Dr Sayed El Gayer and Dr M. P. Jones who had a look at the piece 1989 and found the following: "The nickel content is far less than 7%, thereby confirming that it is not meteoritic iron - certainly man-made. It had been smelted at a temperature of between 1000º and 1100º centigrade. It had traces of gold on one face." Using Franz Löhner's methods for stone cutting doesn't imply you
will find iron tools on or inside the pyramid - since those tools were
primarily necessary to cut the hard granite. Anyway, because the stones
were cut and beveled at the stone quarries there is not much need of iron
tools on the pyramid itself! Tools in ancient Egypt:
For the construction of the pyramid of Khufu granite was used for the
first time on a grand scale (an earlier pyramid, Djoser's pyramid, has
an inner granite chamber) and for the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure
again large quantities of granite were used for building, actually the
first 16 outer stone layers of the pyramid of Menkaure are entirely of
granite [7].
Questioning this technique / method
Question: F. Löhner's answer: 1. Sawing granite with copper saws: 2. Drilling with a bow drill and copper bits: 3. Splitting granite with wedges: Question: F. Löhner's answer:
Question: F. Löhner's answer:
Question: F. Löhner's answer: Because the procedure for making wrought iron and steel is very elaborate it is doubtful, that the Egyptians had already mastered it. But at that time the Egyptians already traded with the Hittites and Greeks and I think they acquired the valuable iron by trading. The Egyptian smiths then made tools from this iron or at least were able to maintain (= temper and sharpen) the tools acquired. I also don't believe in a mysterious process to harden copper which only the Egyptians knew about and which was then later forgotten!
Question: J. Röder [8] writes, that with a hammer made from Dolorite he reduced stone by about 12cm³ per minute and calculates, that 6000cm³ of material could be chipped off during a working day (= cube with a length of 18.2cm). The archeologist Mark Lehner [2] writes of an experiment, where he hit a stone during 5 hours with a stone tool and reduced an area of 30cm by 30cm by 2cm (= 6cm³ per minute, or a cube with a length of 14.3cm per day). R. and D. Klemm [7] write, that deep channels were driven in around granite blocks using stone tools made from Dolorite. F. Löhner's answer:
Question: F. Löhner's answer:
SourcesThese methods for cutting stones were first published 1993 in the book "Der Bau der Cheops-Pyramide" by Heribert Illig and Franz Löhner. [1] G. Goyon Die
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