Posted by  d on August 30, 2002 at 23:16:07:

In Reply to:  Gargantuan milling machine posted by Robert Henderson on August 30, 2002 at 20:54:08:

I hope you won't think I am being facetious, if I mention that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, were able to "mill out" granite sarcophagi by a process which is still somewhat mysterious.
The best guess (I think it was recently confirmed) is that they were able to use tubular drills of sizeable diamter, with a slurry of sand and liquid to act as an abrasive/lubricant.
Such a drill would have to be rotated quickly and under tremendous pressure; so it seems likely the Egyptians somewhere had erected a kind of large "drill press", driven perhaps by falls of rope and weighted by bags of sand....
In a way, they also anticipated numerical control of carving in the separation of their obelisks from bedrock; it seems gangs of men, working, most likely, for months, each "pounding" diorite balls directly downward, drove parallel grooves all around the obelisk and then underneath to free it from the rock. Even today, the grooves remain in the quarry walls, very much resembling the parallel
marks left in machined objects of today.

So it is true that these men were used as machine tools, in a sense; some would say that this shows that they were unwilling slaves, and yet the regularity and ultimate precision of the work, may also imply a certain esprit de corps, solidarity, or even devotion to the work which enabled the production of these magnificent monuments.

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