That description reminds me of several different so called unfinished pyramids.

Skip to 4 minutes.

You suck.  You sent me down the rabbit howl

Lol, the Mesopotamians had pottery wheels back to 4000BC and the Naqada Egyptians traded extensively with them.  The dynastic stage of ancient egyptian history didn't just miracle itself into existence the day after those folks came down outta the trees.  We also know of pully-like arrangements from construction remnants from the early dynastic or late naqada stages.  Suffice to say "my mythology" doesn't preclude that vase or any of the other incredible examples from that time period.  

And no, the largest structures are not industrial.  Mankind doesn't waste resources like that for any reason other than religion.  You see it in every megalithic society anywhere in the world.  The very first projects requiring the cooperation of hundreds of people occur for religion even before man abandoned nomadic hunter-gatherer life and formed permanent settlements... Gobleki Tepe, Stonehenge, Nabta Playa, etc.

Make me a diorite vase on a potters wheel. Move me a 750 ton stone using a water craft held together with strings and glue.

I couldn't make you a square piece of stone with every modern tool available, and I've been known to flip and sink canoes.  My and your inability to replicate the works of master craftsmen and engineers from ancient times doesn't mean shit.

That is true, It is also true that they might have had stuff we don't know about. The knowledge of it's existence didn't survive 4500 years.

But you can beat me about the brows until the cows come home, drug addled stone age sun worshipping goat herders didn't build the pyramids for an inbred godking.

I have been in an ornery mood lately/

Sorry Winston.

You're right.  Drug addled bronze age sun worshiping grain farmers built the pyramids for an inbred godking, mostly because the godking temporarily won the eternal battle of king vs priest.

Akhenaten being usurped for King Tut was what happens when the priests win.  Back and forth it went throughout their history.  It's also interesting to note how successful Khafre was in making sure his name carried through history.  He was probably the most successful pharaoh in making his claim to godhood and being worshipped by later generations.

Pretty sure  there was no industrial mining of copper, or smelting bronze or brass in Egypt 4500BCE. They were in the late stone age. In Egypt those who did animal husbandry were considered above grain farmers IIRC. Chances are that group would have been the movers and shakers organizing things. They were what would become the equestrian class.

That reminds me of this. A stone block and tackle sort of thing found on old kingdom sites/

The first pyramid was constructed around 2650BC.  The bronze age is usually dated to around 3100BC in Egypt, the technology likely having come from Mesopotamia.

Sporadic access to Indus valley luxury trade goods is not the same thing as native mining and smelting for industrial use that occurred during  the new kingdom.

Bronze was only in common use from the new kingdom forward. That is about 1200 years after the 4th dynasty.

Sporadic?   They had firm trade routes before the bronze came into the picture, but that's not where the ore came from for Egyptian bronze.  Egyptian bronze comes from copper and tin mined in the Levant- Jordan, Israel, etc.  Egyptian/Levantine trade was if anything more consistent and was certainly greater in quantity.  Wadi Faynan's copper production dates back to the same timeframe as the emergence of bronze in Egypt and there are Egyptian bronze trade goods found throughout the Med dating back to the old kingdom.  The earliest evidence of copper work in Egypt is probably faience beads colored with blue and green pigments containing copper, those are easily dated to Naqada.

Shit by the New Kingdom they were even working meteoric iron with incredible skill.

I don't think there is anyone who says that Egypt was established in the manufacture of Bronze in the Old Kingdom.

Copper in the form of small tool kits are known.https://archaeopress.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/metal-tools-of-the-pyramid-builders-and-other-craftsmen-in-the-old-kingdom/

The first trade of bronze to Egypt occurred in the 3rd dynasty I think. It was in the form of jewelry from the Indus valley IIRC. Very little bronze is found until the middle kingdom. It too was traded in from the Levant.

I have no use for the modern tradition of narrative history. It always goes back to a lord with one eye brow and a family collection of stolen gold plates donated to a university.

Your source says this:

"Already, in the Early Dynastic Period, Egyptians certainly knew bronze as the oldest securely-dated bronze objects, spouted jar and wash basin, have been found in the tomb of King Khasekhemwy, built and furnished at the end of Second Dynasty."

The second and third dynasties were Old Kingdom.  That stuff doesn't last too well except in extraordinary circumstances, there's plenty of art going back earlier with tools depicted suggesting copper or bronze, but yea, probably copper.  

Khasekhemwy's successor was Djoser.

the answer to the puzzle is the simplest obvious answer without going into what's more likely.

what's obvious is that there many places around the world where ancient technologies lacked necessary tools to build these sites. Maybe there was another great civilization that build all this.

There's lots of places around the world where we're not sure how ancient man used the basic tools he had to build those sites.

Big difference.

"Prehistoric Egyptian Dagger with a triangular blade. Gold, Ivory and Copper. Late Gerzean (Naqada) Period, 3800-3200 BC."

Apropos of no ongoing discussion, I went down a bit of a hole on the ceremonial cosmetics palettes like the Narmer Palette.  This one's older, less important, but it's fucking neato.

Again, those were imported luxury trade objects. Literally royal jewels placed in a hoard due to the scarcity of bronze. I have been fairly clear in that I am talking about domestic manufacture and use for masonry tools.

Copper wasn't even a common tool material at the time of Khufu.

Lead was far more common.

The problem is you keep trying to back up your "bronze was rare" schtick with other incorrect (and easily shown so), claims like "copper wasn't common".

They were pulling copper adze blades and tools out of Naqada graves, and not just the royals.  If you want to look it up yourself go search on "arsenical copper tools naqada" or something like that.  The oldest copper found goes back to the Badarian culture.  By late Naqada it was common.  When farmers are using big chunks of the stuff to dig in the ground and shape wood it's not rare.  I would say however that the division between late Naqada and early dynastic is a hazy line that is set without regard to metallurgical skill but it's probably a bit more than coincidental that a rapid period of social development coincides with the introduction of new technologies.  When you look at art from one end of the Naqada period to the other, it's pretty incredible how fast things developed.  Things went from roughly scratched pictographs to the beginnings of complex traditional ancient egyptian artistic styles comparatively quickly.

In the early bronze age copper tools were still more popular than bronze.  True everywhere they had a bronze age.  

An important note though is that I'm not claiming bronze tools to be necessary to build the pyramids. Even through the New Kingdom, quarrying was a stone on stone operation.  

Stone worked stone, circa 18th dynasty:





Say hi, Hassan!



Bronze:





\

Steel:





Neat to see all the options on display just feet from each other.

And while we're at it:



All the sites in Egypt have that Disney "exit through the gift shop" thing going on with plastic figurines, t-shirts, and assorted rubber dogshit straight off the boat from Shenzhen.  The building in the left foreground is that but it's a rare one not to be missed.  There's a fantastic book shop in there as well as a traditional weaver making the most beautiful silk and wool scarves.. $40 or so will get you something the Mrs. will love and the story will make her friends jealous as hell.  

...just don't get caught in that cemetery near dark, that's the only place I saw junkies sprawled out during my trips.  They didn't look too hard to outrun but my experience with arab addicts is slim and I wouldn't chance it.

Who told you thet didn't have metal tools?

Neat to see  Hassan banging a rock with a rock used for moving rocks for 10 years now and doing exactly nothing to it. That same guy can be seen banging on the same rock in videos from like 2010.

You realize those diorite things are for shifting the rocks? Not cutting them.

Imagine you want to move a heavy stone. you put spherical stones of harder stone under it in the middle and slightly shorter rocks of half sphere shape, shaped like what are called pounders to the outside to act as guides. The balls and half spheres of diorite are literally how they moved the rock.

Chances are those uniform groves and pits too narrow for a person to fit in are the result of a machine. The cutting may have been done with stone, but not using the Hassan technique.


You see the problem I have is that you can site a few hundred copper funeral objects made of copper gouged from exposed veins in a time span of a thousand years and call that proof of wide scale manufacture and use.

I would  say a few million people died over that thousand years and of those you found a few hundred of them buried with tools suitable for working green wood.

Pretty sure what you are calling bronze era there is iron age roman. The slot and split technique is roman. the slots were cut with hammer and iron drill.

You know the whole process of quarrying, shipping, and using diorite pounders is VERY VERY WELL KNOWN, right?

Nah, you don't.  

It is though.  

You know the "grooves and pits too small for a man to fit in"?  I'm standing in one when I took some of those photos.  The ridges you see are about half again as wide as the typical size of a pounder stone.  The trenches are about a man's height deep, about as wide as needed for a man to swing that stone.  Put Hassan's stone in a man's hand and stick him in that trench and.. The process becomes very very clear just with your own two eyes.  Some areas were drilled (wood shaft rotated, sand, water) and then broken up to reduce larger areas, likely that was done before the pounder use that resulted in the obvious ridging or crenelations.  The vertical shaft dropping down from the trench around the obelisk was likely drilled then opened up with pounders though of course only the pounded stone edges remain.  The drilling remains look like this:



 And yes, Hassan has easily stood there a decade lightly banging the one rock on the other for tips.  He is not a stone mason, he is a site custodian and guide.  He also gives a great exchange rate when trading USD for EGP as he hates having to visit the bank.  The pounders he's using however were found in the Aswan quarry, similar stones from the same source are found throughout other ancient quarries and the story of their sourcing and transport is interesting in itself as they're sourced closer to Abu Simbel than any other modern site frequented by tourists.  

Hint:  Diorite pounders don't start out round.



Hint #2:



"A) Bronze chisel of the 19th or 21st Dynasty. From the el-Dibabiya limestone quarry
B) Bronze chisel of the 18th dynasty, reign of Akhenaten, found at Tell el-Amarna."

Both were in the Cairo museum, likely they're either on their way or at the Grand Museum now.

When bronze chisels were used, small rectangular notches were cut, chunks of dry wood inserted, water poured on, and the swelling wood cracked the stone along the line of notches.  The notch method is very typical of the use of bronze tools and easily predated the ptolemaic period, as the chisels above show clearly.  The notches are generally a roughly consistent size, use this as a judge of scale for the photos above, but be aware that I have hands the size of a 12 year old girl's.



Then, as we can see with the obelisk, shaping was with pounders even WELL AFTER THE INTRODUCTION OF BRONZE TOOLS.  Rock on rock and non-metallic abrasive drilling were still heavily used.

Go and see for yourself, direct flights from JFK to Cairo have never been cheaper and a connecting flight from Cairo to Aswan won't run more than $100.  Don't stay at the Basma, yes you can get great distance shots of the quarry but the elevator is scary, the restaurant sucks, and the water conks out.  Go for the Movenpick or whatever the big western hotel is on Elephantine Island.  Heck there's even a cheap and decent looking Airbnb less than 100 yards from the quarry gate.  You might have some minor difficulty getting a ride from there to Gebel al Asr but if you can, get him to take you to Nabta Playa too. Gotta get it all done in a day though because you have to be back out of the security area by nightfall or they send the goon squad to come find you.  

Here's a few more from my pix that will give some idea of the scale of the obelisk and thus the tool marks..

Buncha yahoos standing on the point of the obelisk


Point of the obelisk



The trench around the obelisk with the shaft, I don't know the purpose of the shaft but it may have been exploring the rock quality at some point in construction:



A view from the other end of the obelisk from above with the recently added "footbridge" stone



That stone is probably about five feet by two feet or so



And for a bit more scale, here are successfully built, transported, and erected obelisks 100-150 miles downstream at Karnak





Hatshepsut's folly above would've easily dwarfed those, and think about that for a minute... 18th dynasty.  New Kingdom.  Pre-Roman invasion.  Bronze yes, steel no...

...and the thing that stopped the project was not transport or cost, it was an unforeseeable flaw in the stone that cracked during quarrying.  I think it pretty darned unlikely that they would've gone as far as they did with the project without the ability to transport it or pay for it or finish and erect it at Karnak.  I'd guess it was probably the largest object ancient egyptians ever planned to move.  Even the rock stars of later dynasties didn't try anything like that.  It would've topped a thousand tons.  The colossal statue of Ramses II was only 80-85.  I call it feminist phallic overcompensation, really.  

(not my pic)


ETA- LOL just noticed which yahoos those were on the obelisk.  We were constantly inundated by rude chinese tourists in large groups while we were there last.  That is them.  Shoving, attempting to cut lines, bitching and complaining about anything they thought would get them a discount or a shorter wait, coughing in people's faces, spitting, littering.. Real charmers.

You are standing in trench created by lots of uniform holes dug vertically downward from above. The remnants of vertical shafts are in your picture as narrow groves and ridges. The narrow shaft is what  looks like 4 individual vertical holes connected. There was a machine involved. the groves are where the bit cut, the ridges are the stone broken away after the holes are sunk/



sorry for one less "o" than needed in too, it would have screwed up the text lay out.

no man banging with a rock did that. Though diorite is as good a candidate as any for bit materials assuming my theory is wrong, though to me it looks more like something spinning fast did it, (you know like the saw marks that you ignore and lathe marks that you ignore and the tube drill marks that you ignore suggest fast feed rates and fast spinning stone cutting tools.)

Since you like to ignore what I  point out in favor of  polemics I am not going to bother to say that I have read the same source material as you and that is why I reject it.


Oh and masonry bits have a star point like this, those in the pictureare probably not what was used.



Copper, brass and bronze are around 2-3 on the mohs scale. Granite is 6-7, Diorite is 7.

Prove your contention that there were heretofore unknown rock cutting machines at work.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  Youtube videos are not that.

I'll wait.

And I'm pretty sure you haven't read the same source material.  It's my charitable nature that leads me to disbelieve that you've actually had the evidence in front of you but  rejected it in favor of far less likely imaginings of machinery.  Also, just go and see with your own eyes.  

Yeah, I could see how you might come to that conclusion. I'm a just simple rude farmer after all. You tell me you got a baboon shits gold nuggets I gotta see it to believe it.

I can only show you marks left in the stone, meaning they are indeed known.

Sorry I asked your pet baboon to shit gold nuggets.

The most likely source of those marks isn't nearly close to what you're claiming though.  

See, there's your problem... It aint a baboon it's a cat, and those are neither gold nuggets nor tootsie rolls. He can't even read and he's unimpressed.



Do you have anything at all to back up your assertions or shall we just smile and nod like with the Abydos helicopter guys and the Dendara Light aficionados?

The guys I had to ask to get the pics of the Light and the chopper rolled their eyes soooooo hard... lol

For what it is worth I think you and the mainline are exactly right with the anthro side. Or as right as the records allow.
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I think there is two possibilities to explain things.

A) the priests had mundane tech and called it god magic.< That may seem unrealistic but our society decided men could be woman in a year. All they gotta do is put on a wig and have their reproductive organs turned inside out. Now imagine what you could do to the minds of peasants circa 4500BCE

B)Someone else in deep antiquity did and the structures were claimed by the people that found it.

lol, x2. first thought when seeing this OP.

A.  

Ever heard of the nileometers?  Fancy river gauges.  The priesthood controlled them and thus the priesthood controlled the social knowledge of the most important event in a year, the nile flooding.  That's but a small example of the "god magic" issue in ancient egypt.  That's the whole "priesthood vs pharaoh" thing.  Khufu was evidently known in antiquity for all but closing the temples, putting the priests out of business, in favor of his ideas***.  Akhenaten tried the same with a hell of a lot less success.

That's what happens when your theological underpinning says that only the priests can talk to the gods and communicate their wishes to man.  

Seriously though, check out the Kephren (or Kefren or Chephren or Chefren) quarries west of Abu Simbel.  Ok fine yea that's where the diorite tool stones originate and that's where the old kingdom diorite statues and pottery comes from, but look into what they've found about the transport of material from that site.  Think about the canals they dug for that.    I think it makes a lot of the crazier stone moves a bit more understandable.  There's hints of canals all over the giza plateau for instance, and when the nile came up, the farmers were out of work for a while.. Long enough to help move stone blocks or pull on a rope to erect obelisks and shit.

We underestimate them but I don't think we underestimate them to the point that there's industrial purpose to the pyramids or unknown digging machinery in the quarries. The likelihood of that to me is far less than the likelihood of the "mainline."  I think we underestimate their skill with the tools we knew they had.  In a lot of cases I know the common understanding does.  I think we've lost so much of that knowledge since better tools came along that yea, at times it must seem like aliens came down and helped because it's just so foreign to us. I think machines with no hint of existence and technologies we'd consider magic (melting rocks, etc) are FAAAAAAAR less likely, and I don't think that a daring supposition.  We have an enormous leap in society around the dawning of the bronze age over MAYBE 5-600 years that quickly forms the basis for thousands of years of art and society, things kind of percolate on that way and the existing technology is worked over with generation after generation of artisan and engineer.  No real surprise that the dawn of the iron age brings with it sea changes in the form of the ptolemies, permanent subjugation, and whatnot.

You saw those chisels, that'd just about perfectly fit in the niche I stuck my hand into for scale.  That was something I only noticed today and I saw those chisels at the museum. Sometimes the connections are hard to make when you're drinking from the firehose.  

At the end of the day we have no evidence that there weren't giant-ass Big Muskie draglines and Bridgeport milling machines.  We can't prove that something didn't happen.  All we can do is try to keep our imaginings within the confines of what we know did actually happen beyond a doubt.

Are our imaginings overly conservative?  Almost certainly.  Does keeping a conservative view help as we add more knowledge?  Also almost certainly.



ETA- ***-Khufu's ideas:

Dendera.  

Gotta go back to Dendera.

A slave with a coarse piece of rock has the rest of their life to do it.

I don't know if they were one piece columns.

The blue stuff was blue back then.  They worked out the very first artificial blue and green tints/dyes but that might not necessarily be them.  That's Ptolemaic but they had the blue dyes back to old kingdom at least.

pretty sure they were multiple pieces of sand stone that were then covered in plaster castings.

See, its proof of aliens built it.
Notice the columns mimic a space ship taking off with fire and smoke.

Attached File

actually it is proof that they were low rent copying old kingdom stuff 2000 years later in an attempt to tie themselves to the older culture.

old kingdom made hundreds of single piece 30-50 foot high fluted granite columns.

The greeks were just stacking soft rocks and slapping plaster over it.

Proof the Old Kingdom made it?

Well, the foundations might be old kingdom maybe.


Chances are anything  there from the old kingdom that  is left now would either be too heavy to carry off or too hard to break and then carry off.

How do you know Gobekli Tepe people didn’t make them and Old Kingdom Egyptians just took credit?

Obviously it is because the Tepes didn't write their name on a piece of rock they broke off a temple  built 2000 years prior, after a super lucid dream.

Well, during the 5.500 years directly after Gobekli Tepe was built, the Sahara was wet. According to the mainstream, Pharaonic egypt is a result of the end of that wet period pushing people into the nile delta.

edit:

Also the theory is that Gobekli Tepe was abandoned due to the same climate shift making Anatolia too arid.

If they went north they would deal with harsher winters. South, shorter more forgiving cold seasons.

There is probably no way to know where they went, but south into north Africa seems more logical.

Then this thread wouldn’t exist

I see what you did there