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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

skill and experience. It seemed, moreover, as Flinders Petrie admitted<br />

with some puzzlement after completing his painstaking survey of the<br />

Great Pyramid, that these craftsmen had access to tools ‘such as we<br />

ourselves have only now reinvented ...’ 9<br />

Petrie examined the sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that<br />

it must have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with straight<br />

saws ‘8 feet or more in length’. Since the granite was extremely hard, he<br />

could only assume that these saws must have had bronze blades (the<br />

hardest metal then supposedly available) inset with ‘cutting points’ made<br />

of even harder jewels: ‘The character of the work would certainly seem to<br />

point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only the considerations<br />

of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this<br />

conclusion ...’ 10<br />

An even bigger mystery surrounded the hollowing out of the<br />

sarcophagus, obviously a far more difficult enterprise than separating it<br />

from a block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians must<br />

have:<br />

adapted their sawing principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form, curving<br />

the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a circular groove by its rotation;<br />

thus by breaking away the cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out<br />

large holes with a minimum of labour. These tubular drills varied from 1/4 inch to<br />

5 inches diameter, and from 1/30 to 1/5 inch thick ... 11<br />

Of course, as Petrie admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever<br />

been found by Egyptologists. 12 The visible evidence of the kinds of<br />

drilling and sawing that had been done, however, compelled him to infer<br />

that such instruments must have existed. He became especially<br />

interested in this and extended his study to include not only the King’s<br />

Chamber sarcophagus but many other granite artefacts and granite ‘drill<br />

cores’ which he collected at Giza. The deeper his research, however, the<br />

more puzzling the stone-cutting technology of the Ancient Egyptians<br />

became:<br />

The amount of pressure, shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws<br />

pierced through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load of at least a<br />

ton or two was placed on the 4-inch drills cutting in granite. On the granite core<br />

No 7 the spiral of the cut sinks 1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, a rate of<br />

ploughing out which is astonishing ... These rapid spiral grooves cannot be<br />

ascribed to anything but the descent of the drill into the granite under enormous<br />

pressure ... 13<br />

Wasn’t it peculiar that at the supposed dawn of human civilization, more<br />

than 4500 years ago, the Ancient Egyptians had acquired what sounded<br />

9 Secrets of the Great Pyramid, p. 103.<br />

10 The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 74.<br />

11 Ibid., p. 76.<br />

12 Ibid., p. 78.<br />

13 Ibid.<br />

320

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