The artifact above is one of many that confuse many academics because it does not fit in with the culture that supposedly made it, as in the Dynastic Egyptians. Schist is a hard, yet brittle layered stone which is very difficult to work. Most engineers who see this object believe it to be part of an ancient machine, yet the Dynastic Egyptians did not have such mechanismsβ¦or did they? It is amazing that it is actually on display in the Cairo museum, but how many more of them are there, stored away in boxes and out of sight?
In the photo above, thanks to Stephen Mehler of the Khemit School we see two stone bowls right and left that would appear to have been turned on a lathe, and another curious schist artifact in the center. The Dynastic Egyptians did have the potters wheel for shaping clay, but did they have lathes as well? The artifact above is in the Petrie Museum in London. As the description states, it is a basalt stone cup, turned and with traces of a tube drill hole.
Basalt is a very hard stone, and could not have been shaped with the bronze tools of the Dynastic Egyptians, so is it in fact older, and made by a more technological culture?
And this vase or cup is even harder to explain. It is rock quartz crystal, clearly shaped on a lathe. Quartz is 7 out of 10 on the Mohs scale of hardness, with diamond being The tools used to shape had to have been harder than the quartz itself.
As we continue through the museum, a number drill cores appear, the one above being hard granite. You can even see the grooves left by the tool which did the work. We of course have core tube drills in the 21st century, embedded with diamonds, but the Dynastic Egyptians did not have this level of technology.
