Where Are The Tools?

By B. B. Dade

NAMA Machine d’Anticythère 1 by Marsyas is licenced under CC BY 2.5

There are many fascinating riddles and mysteries in history. What happened to the Mary Celeste? Where did Lord Lucan go? Who was behind the shooting of John Kennedy? Who pooped in Depp’s bed? We may never know. But for me, one of the most beguiling and bewitching enigmas is that of the missing ancient tools.

There are a myriad of examples from the ancient world of, essentially, precision engineering, yet there seems to be no evidence of the tools—and machine tools—which these artifacts suggest must have existed. This is a very odd set of circumstances.

For example, buried beneath Djoser’s Pyramid—the Step Pyramid—which is undoubtedly among Egypt’s oldest pyramids, was found a veritable treasure trove of stone jars and pots. Surprisingly, to put it mildly, these vessels appear to have been worked to a truly fantastic level of precision. Fashioned from some of the hardest stone available—granite, porphyry, basalt, diorite—they defy any reasonable explanation. It is a simple statement of fact that granite cannot be worked with exactitude by copper-tipped tools; which is what the mainstream archaeologists and Egyptologists ask us to accept. It would be like trying to whittle mahogany with a knob of butter. It doesn’t matter how hard or long you try, physics will just not allow it. So here is a true mystery.

If we are to reject the conventional explanation, i.e. that just somehow diorite pots were hewn to paper thinness by copper tools, then it immediately begs the question, where are the tools that did do this work? The bizarre fact of the matter is that the archaeologists have never found a single example of such tools. Either the ancients had an entirely novel and now lost methods of working stone, or the tools are still out there to be found. That we have not yet discovered a single example is indeed baffling.

It isn’t just Djoser’s jars which stick out like a sore thumb. There are a great many examples in Egypt of stone having apparently been carved or shaped by tools beyond what the archaeological record allows us to say with certitude would have been used. There are examples of large blocks showing over-cuts or saw marks: inexplicable. The list goes on. How about those circular drill holes and their cores? Totally inexplicable by the current set of explanations. Can anyone out there explain the famous Schist Disc? Not only is it entirely unclear what this artifact is, but how it might have been manufactured deep in antiquity is a profound puzzle.

There are yet more examples of objects which undoubtedly date from ancient times, which, in terms of how they would have been constructed, are incomprehensible. The Antikythera Mechanism is a perfect example. It is the remnant of a machine which beyond question dates from the second century BC. It has a whole mess load of cogs and gears. Dozens of gears! Incredible.

Not only is it a spellbinding object in and of itself, but it suggests a whole slew of necessary and now lost technologies which would have been required for it to exist in the first place. The largest gear—still only about 13 centimeters in diameter—would have had 223 teeth. Extraordinary. That means that in the second century BC they understood gearing, and further, could precision engineer the components needed to make it a reality.

Where are all the machine tools needed for such delicate and precise projects? Where are all the other examples of ancient cogs and gears? Where is the literary evidence for the slow progression towards these technologies? Where are the later equivalents of the Antikythera Mechanism? They are all lost; apparently.

Broadly speaking, it does seem to me undeniably mysterious that there is a total, complete lack of archaeological evidence for the tools required to achieve some of the results mentioned above. The most plausible explanation is that the archaeologists will at some point dig up that exact evidence. Until such time, though, anomalies like the Schist Disk or the Antikythera Mechanism remain an enchanting conundrum.