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Rock Art Mystery
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Steve Gray
Steve Gray
931 posts

Re: Rock Art Mystery
Oct 10, 2003, 11:09
As you may have gathered, I have been more into Egyptian techniques than British. However, I don't see why they should differ all that much. They were both solving the same problems and had access to similar resources.

While we know that dolerite balls were used to "rough-out" large objects like obelisks, sarcophogii and colossii, it has long intrigued me as to how they accomplished their detailed work. I have examined granite hieroglyphs in the BM and some of them are several millimetres deep and are amazingly finely crafted, with very sharp internal corner radii.

It's known that the Egyptians used copper cylinders with a slurry of quartz sand to "core-drill" rings and holes in hard stones. There is even some evidence that they used copper slab saws. A similar technique could be used to make a cup-shape by using a blunt wooden stick with a sand slurry to grind out the shape. A simple "bow-drill" could have been used to rotate it.

However, I come back to the hieroglyphs and I reckon that they must have been picked or chiselled out using small hard stones attached to wooden or copper handles. Quartz is hard enought for many stones, but for some of the really tough ones they would have needed gemstones.

Egyptian mummies have been found with emeralds and other hard stones, so there is no doubt that suitable gems were available to them. The fact that no such tools have survived in the archaeological record is hardly surprising. They would have been a vauable resource and would most likely have been recycled as jewellery once their useful cutting lifespan had been exceeded.
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