Renewable Revolution

I have been pondering the following question:

If I was an Egyptian 5,000 years ago and I wanted to make a stone surface really, really flat, how would I go about it?

Well, let's see now, what is the flattest surface I have ever seen in my life in the land of the Nile (no jokes, ya hear? This is serious business! I'm trying to do some high tech stuff with low tech hand jobs - Wipe that smile off your face!   ).

Flat tires? NOPE, they didn't have tires. Flat women? NOPE, the human anatomy can be subject to certain bits of low class humor but it is, according to Stephen Hawking, definitely not macroscopically flat, never mind near microscopically flat. Therefore being flat-assed broke is not applicable to this bit of scientific inquiry. And when I knocked my stone cutting supervisor flat, he still made a lumpy appearance laying on the ground. :

You see, we had a bit of a discussion about "flatness".  He said my work is not flat enough for Pharaoh standards. He said a lot more than that but this is PG discussion. 

The altercation aside, what my stupidvisor did was pour some water on the workpiece I am putting my heart, soul and most of the copper and sand in Egypt into! That water did NOT run off my workpiece.    I stared at the stupidvisor and told him, this is flat!   

HE smirked and went over to three nondescript areas of my piece and said, NOPE! Those areas were slightly drier than the rest of the piece.    He said the water must look the SAME over the entire piece without running off at minimum thickness or I may find myself in the salt mines soon where high caliber precision is not required... 

I let him have it. POW, right in the kisser! It's a good thing he is my sister's half cousin or I would be Nile crock food right now. 

After I apologized and promised to work on the slight imperfections, he took out his hair measuring gizmo and showed me some places in the stone where there were depressions in the water a few hairs DEEPER than the acceptable Pharaoh stone flatness standard. 

That means I have to work the WHOLE PIECE down to those levels.    That means another two months to get this 43 cubit rock up to snuff instead of a few days. And never mind the amount of copper I need for THAT!   

My stupidvisor did not smirk again but he did say all my lunch breaks were cancelled until I got these 43 cubits by 14 cubits exactly RIGHT!
GROAN! 

Egypt sucks! I'm going to the twenty first century and pretend this never happened!    i]

The point of the above thought exercise is to try to think like an ancient Egyptian. The flattest thing they ever saw in their entire lives was the surface of water in a pool with no wind. That IS pretty flat. Is it microscopically flat? I'll let you know when I do some research. Of course, they had ICE in those days too. BUT NOT IN EGYPT unless the climate was much different han it is now:

Climate of Egypt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Egypt essentially has a hot desert climate (Köppen climate classification BWh). The climate is generally extremely dry all over the country except on the northern Mediterranean coast which receives more rainfall in winter. In addition to rarity of rain, extreme heat during summer months is also a general climate feature of Egypt although daytime temperature are obviously more moderated along the northern coast.

The prevailing winds from the Mediterranean Sea continuously blow over the northern coast without the interposition of an eventual mountain range and thus, greatly moderate temperatures throughout the year. Because of this effect, averages low temperature vary from 9.5 °C (49.1 °F) during wintertime to 23 °C (73.4 °F) to summertime and averages high temperatures vary from 17 °C (62.6 °F) during wintertime to 32 °C (89.6 °F) in summertime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Egypt

So only some wild dudes that went in reed boat ships to colder places had ever seen ice. And when they DID see it, it was moving around a lot.  :emthdown:

There are a few rocks, like flag stones, that naturally split into fairly flat surfaces. Perhaps the Egyptian craftsmen had seen flagstones. But flagstones are okay to walk on put they crap compared with Egyptian workpieces. Nevertheless, the ancients had a THING fro making their stone cut surfaces extremely flat. That certainly makes sense if you are going pile one on top of the other and wish to get a building or pyramid that doesn't resemble a drunken sailor.

Assuming (now I'm getting in trouble here for sure.  :icon_mrgreen:) that the REASON the ancient wanted their work to have a flat surface was because they wanted to put other pieces on top, then there would be no need to make the SIDES equally as flat, right? Wrong?

Sure, aesthetically, a nice long rectangular solid is more pleasing than one with wavy walls but this is something that is important in analyzing what they did and why they did it.

We know they OBVIOUSLY quarried the stones. We know where the quarry is (about 500 miles from the main monuments to this that and the other ET   giant gods that preferred sitting to standing - AHA! Scientific proof that the Egyptians were pretty laid back. Settle down Ashvin, I'm kidding!  ).

Now if they used the handy dandy hair meter I invented ex nihilo in my quest to come up with a LOW TECH device they could have had back then to measure flatness, they needed to combine it with the molecular adhesive quality of water to create a thin film over a flat surface. No, they didn't need to understand molecules to know water is rather flat and, if it doesn't run, the surface it is on is really flat.

Water, because of its hydrogen bonds, WILL try to go "uphill" with the surface because it is attracted to itself. However, it will thin out somewhat (water is VERY elastic - I know this because I have studied tree transpiration - water in the tracheal capillaries of a tree can be stretched to 1/26th or so of it's normal density AS LONG as the vacuum holds inside the tree - That's how it climbs up to the leaves from the roots - Test on Monday.  ) . A craftsman with a good eye will see the water thinned out in some areas and, with a hair gage, could find depressions that the human eye could not detect. Yes, the "hair" gage would have to be treated with a hydrophobic substance (a bit of olive oil might do it!) to keep the water molecules from climbing up the gage and ruining the reading, so to speak.

But once they got the TOP surface so flat that they needed to attack Cyprus (the copper mining mecca of that time period) because they were going through the copper stash like there was no tomorrow, they would HAVE to rotate the workpiece so all four sides, one at a time, became the TOP for flattening.

Well Doomers, do you think this would work? Has anybody done the math on the amount of copper and sand they need to do what they did? Everyone knows sand is abrasive. It is abrasive BECAUSE it has some very hard rocks in it. Yes, it has soft rocks that wear away too but THOSE aren't the ones that make sand do what it does. If you don't believe me but talcum powder on your sand paper.

Stocks' hypothesis is that there was enough copper, combined with the aid of sand abrasives, to do all this by hand. With the water technique I dreamed up, perhaps it is possible IF hey had enough copper and IF they had enough man power NOT tied up in growing food or whipping the slaves into shape. Egypt was NOT exactly a "life of leisure" for anybody but the Pharaoh (and the "priesthood" of course - those guys always have an angle     ).

The biggest elephant in the Stocks hypothesis (he alleges they did it by hand by using copper tools to drill limestone, producing rather crude - by ancient Egyptian standards, work. He also has not demonstrated successfully that the copper and sand technique works on Marble or Granite) is TIME. The time it is estimated those monuments took to complete is way too low, in my opinion, for the massive amount of product, as evidenced by so much expertly cut stone laying around, of many, many flat surfaces and circular drilling.

How long did it take to build these things? That is really important. They need skilled craftsmen working quickly for, say, a 25 year period with machine tools. They needed perhaps a century or more to do it by hand with quite a bit of labor dedicated exclusively to this effort. Yes, the monuments were apparently built at different times and on different schedules so it is a huge bag of worms to try to pin it down.


I'll get back to you on how flat water adhesion on a flat surface can achieve as far as tolerances. If you van get .01 or better, that may be how they did it. But I don't have an answer to the extremely precise circular drilling and the feed rate consistency, the lathe quality work when they weren't supposed to have them and for the machine tool marks.

Eddie, you do a lot of drilling. Help me out here. I made a hollow "drill bit" out of some copper tubing to drill some wood years ago for a project I was working on (needed a big bit). I hacksawed some teeth on it and went to town. It lasted about 3 days. Harwood eats copper pretty quick.     I used a power drill. If it had been by hand with some sand, maybe I would get more out of it but I do not see how copper can work successfully on marble or granite, even if you have an unlimited supply from Crete or Cyprus (or whoever they plundered to get copper in those days - I'm sure it wasn't free!) to throw at it.