A few days ago, I introduced you to how the ancient Egyptians cut granite. For architectural reasons, the ancient Egyptians also often drilled holes in granite (Figures 1 and 2). In the absence of steel workers

A few days ago, I introduced you to how the ancient Egyptians cut granite. For architectural reasons, the ancient Egyptians also often drilled holes in granite (Figures 1 and 2). How is drilling in hard granite possible without steel tools?

This question has plagued scholars for many years. Later, the following scenes in ancient Egyptian tomb frescoes caught the attention of scholars (Figures 3 and 4). These frescoes depict scenes of ancient Egyptians giving bows and furniture an eye. Based on this, they boldly speculate that the ancient Egyptians may have adopted this method of drilling the granite.

To test their suspicions, Egyptologists and experts on ancient tools came to the Aswan region of Egypt in 1999. They imitated the tools of the ancient Egyptians, made a copper pipe, and used the above method to try to drill holes in the granite (Figure 5). After the copper tube is drilled in, the stone core is knocked out using a copper chisel (Fig. 6), and the drilling is completed (Fig. 7). Of course, in the process of drilling holes, the abrasive mortar commonly used in ancient Egypt was indispensable, which consisted of water, gypsum powder and hard crushed quartz sand.

Experimental results have proved that this method is feasible.