Written by Everyone repeats the whole “ancient Egyptians used copper tube drills” thing, right? That’s the official line for how they cut into granite. Sounds neat… until you realize something weird: there isn’t a single copper tube drill ever found in Egypt. Not even a fragment. Nothing.
And to make it strange, the drill marks we *do* have don’t behave like anything made with those little bow drills people try to recreate in videos.
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Petrie’s Drill Core No. 7 – the odd one out
So Flinders Petrie, the guy who lived and breathed Egyptian archaeology, found this drill core (the famous “Core No. 7”) and even he didn’t know what to make of it.
He flat-out wrote that the grooves on the granite looked like they were made by a cutting point pressed with something like a ton of force.
A ton of pressure… from a thin copper tube? Really?
People have tried copying the marks using the bow drill setup, but here’s where it gets messy:
• Bow drills leave horizontal rings around the stone
• The Egyptian core shows a perfect, continuous spiral groove going downward
Somebody even wrapped a thread along the grooves just to check, and yep — it’s a spiral. So the “official explanation” already starts wobbling at this point.
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Christopher Dunn’s calculation that freaks everyone out
This is where the mainstream crowd gets uncomfortable.
Engineer Christopher Dunn measured the spacing between the spiral grooves of Core No. 7 and calculated that the drill must’ve been dropping:
0.1 inch downward per rotation
If you don’t mess around with machining, that might not sound insane, but trust me… that’s wild.
For comparison:
Modern diamond drills spinning at 900 rpm? They cut around 0.0002 inches per rotation.
So yeah…
Ancient Egypt’s mystery drill = roughly 500× more efficient per rotation than today’s industrial tools.
Five. Hundred. Times.
Even Dunn admitted the numbers made no sense if you assume copper, sand, and a little bow drill.
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“Mathematically impossible”
If those grooves really show the drill’s feed rate — and Petrie thought they did — then the whole thing simply shouldn’t be possible. Not with copper. Not with sand. Not with anything we think existed back then.
Copper tubing carving through granite like it’s butter?
And leaving marks cleaner than the stuff modern machines make?
Come on.
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And don’t even get me started on the scoop marks…
If you’ve seen the Aswan quarry, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Those enormous “scoop marks” look like someone was scraping granite away like soft clay.
Granite doesn’t scoop.
Unless you have a tool or method that shouldn’t exist in that era.
Yet we’re still told they just hammered at it with rocks and used copper tubes.
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So what’s going on?
I’m not screaming “aliens” or magic lasers or anything like that…
But something doesn’t add up.
• No copper drills ever found
• Bow drills don’t match the spiral grooves
• Petrie’s comment about ton-level pressure
• Dunn’s insane 500× feed rate difference
• Groove spacing that shouldn’t be possible
• Those scoop marks at Aswan
• And the fact that experts act like it’s all perfectly normal
At a certain point, you have to wonder:
Did the Egyptians have some type of mechanical tech we haven’t identified?
Or are we missing an entire chapter of human history?
Curious what you guys think — is this just me overthinking, or is this genuinely one of the biggest hints that something about ancient technology got lost along the way?