On one stormy day in November 1880, a young and very enthusiastic Englishman, drawn by the mystery and imagination of the Great Pyramids, set sail for Cairo. His intention was to conduct the most studious and exhaustive survey ever undertaken of the temples and monuments of the Giza plateau. Along with the most sophisticated measuring equipment available in his day, he had packed enough supplies to ensure his survival in the hot, barren and very hostile desert, where bandits regularly picked off European travellers as a matter of course.

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) had gained much of his thirst for Ancient Egypt at a tender age. His father, the civil engineer William Petrie, was an ardent supporter of Charles Piazzi Smyth, the famous Astronomer Royal of Scotland, who in the 1860s had drawn immense attention to the Great Pyramid by seeming to confirm the long-held belief that geodetic knowledge of the earth’s size could be found in its overall design and measurements. Yet because Smyth had been unable to accredit such feats of engineering to the Ancient Egyptians, who were looked on with disdain in the Bible, he concluded that the pyramid builders had been inspired by God himself, in the same way that the Lord had inspired Noah to build the Ark of the Flood and Moses to construct the Ark of the Covenant. Such assertions had in turn spurred another Scottish ‘pyramidologist’ named Robert Menzies to make the claim that the interior measurements of the Great Pyramid contained past, present and future prophecies, including the date of the Second Coming.

This unfortunate situation led to Smyth’s theories on the Great Pyramid’s precision geometry being lumped together with Menzies’ crazy notions of biblical prophecy. His revolutionary findings were dismissed as absurd by the Egyptological community and made a laughing-stock in the popular press. Despite such ridicule, the young Flinders Petrie was undoubtedly fascinated by Smyth’s extraordinary claims. He intended to follow in the footsteps of his father’s mentor and either confirm or deny Smyth’s theories once and for all.

Petrie held a passion for the monuments of Ancient Egypt, born out of a genuine sense of responsibility in recording and not exploiting the wonders of the past, something he accused his contemporaries of in the sternest of words. He was horrified, for instance, at how the ruins of the Sphinx Temple had been shattered by explosives under the direction of so-called Egyptologists who believed that treasure lay buried beneath it in a secret chamber guarded by mechanised devices in human form. ‘It is sickening,’ he wrote, ‘to see the rate at which everything is being destroyed, and the little regard paid to preservation.’¹

Following his arrival at Giza, Petrie set about surveying and triangulating the entire artificially levelled plateau. Everything was checked and double-checked to ensure the greatest possible accuracy, and as he commented at the time: ‘the result of all this mass of checked observations, after duly reducing and computing, was that there was scarcely a point about which one quarter-inch [6.3 millimetres] of uncertainty remained, and most of the points were fixed to within one-tenth of an inch [2.5 millimetres].’²

Once Petrie had completed his survey of the Giza plateau, he focused his attentions on the interiors of its temples and monuments with a similar concern for meticulous accuracy (‘Instead then of simply measuring from wall to wall, and remaining in ignorance of where the discrepancies lay, I always used plumb-lines for measuring all upright faces, and a levelling instrument for all horizontal faces.’)³ So engrossed did he become in his painstaking work that often he would finish his evening meal and then, once the accursed tourists had departed, enter the darkened interior of one of the pyramids and not emerge again until the early hours, sometimes well past dawn.⁴

The results of all this hard work on Petrie’s part were, he realised quickly, ‘decidedly destructive’ for the theories of pyramidologists such as Smyth.⁵ His revised measurements were at odds with those previously used by Smyth to make his calculations. In effect they disproved his findings; this was something Petrie was not happy about, for, as he was later to admit, he would rather it not have been him who had discovered ‘the ugly little fact [that] killed the beautiful theory’.⁶ Some of Smyth’s theories have, however, been ably revived and confirmed in more modern times by the likes of Livio Stecchini and William Fix (see Chapter One).

Petrie did, however, confirm one long-held belief about the Great Pyramid – that ‘the angle of the outside was such as to make the base circuit equal to a circle struck by the height as a radius’,⁷ or in other words the proportions of the structure accurately expressed the mathematical value of pi.⁸ He also confirmed that the measurements of the King’s Chamber displayed a precise knowledge of Pythagorean geometry.⁹

A FEW MEN FAR ABOVE THEIR FELLOWS

That Petrie was in awe of Egypt’s pyramid builders is difficult to deny. He came to believe that those originally responsible for this highly advanced technology belonged to a ‘New Race’, a ruling elite who in Old Kingdom times controlled the construction of pyramids, temples and monuments.¹⁰

Who exactly this ‘New Race’ might have been is never made clear, for the usually conservative Petrie could only conceive of them as a select group possessing technological skills far superior to those of their fellow Egyptians. They were the master craftsmen who decided everything – from which stone to use to what tools should be employed and what angles and measurements were to be incorporated into the building under construction. Once their orders had been given, many jobs would seem to have been left to an Egyptian workforce to complete, a situation that had led Petrie repeatedly to comment on the inexcusable errors so often found alongside the quite magnificent workmanship in buildings such as the Great Pyramid. For example, while Petrie was able to describe the precision involved in the setting out of the Great Pyramid’s five-hectare base as ‘a triumph of skill; its errors, both in length and in angles, could be covered by placing one’s thumb on them’,¹¹ he was dumbfounded by the ‘astonishing carelessness and clumsiness’ of those left in charge of completing its construction.¹² ‘Side by side with this splendid work are,’ he admitted, ‘the strangest mistakes’ in various examples of levelling, dressing, sawing and drilling.¹³

Petrie came to believe that ‘the exquisite workmanship often found in the early periods, did not so much depend on a large school or widespread ability, as on a few men far above their fellows, whose every touch was a triumph. In this way we can reconcile it with the crude, and often clumsy, work in building and sculpture found in the same ages.’¹⁴

So who were these ‘few men far above their fellows’, and what was this ‘New Race’ said to have been in Egypt during its earliest days?

Archaeological evidence supports the idea that members of an unknown race of unparalleled sophistication emerged in Egypt as early as predynastic times, c. 3500–3100 BC. Late predynastic graves in the northern part of Upper Egypt have yielded ‘anatomical remains of a people whose skulls were of a greater size and whose bodies were larger than those of the natives’.¹⁵ Walter Emery, the eminent Egyptologist who made a detailed study of predynastic and early dynastic society in Egypt, was so moved by these discoveries that, in his 1961 book Archaic Egypt, he concluded that:

. . . any suggestion that these people derived from the earlier stock is impossible. The fusion of the two races must have been considerable, but it was not so rapid that by the time of the Unification it could be considered in any way accomplished, for throughout the whole of the Archaic Period the distinction between the civilised aristocracy and the mass of the natives is very marked, particularly in regard to their burial customs. Only with the close of the Second Dynasty do we find evidence of the lower orders adopting the funerary architecture and mode of burial of their masters.¹⁶

So who were these ‘masters’? Who were these ruling elite of great stature? Were they Petrie’s ‘New Race’, the ‘few men far above their fellows’ responsible for Egypt’s stone technology? Emery identified them with the Shemsu-hor, the Companions, or Followers, of the hawk-headed god Horus whom the Royal Canon of Turin says ruled Egypt for an incredible 13,420 years before the ascent of Menes, the first recorded Pharaoh.¹⁷

Emery’s words therefore implied that the Shemsu-hor were not only the governing power behind the establishment of dynastic Egypt but also the descendants of the Sphinx-building Elder gods, or netjeru, who lived during the First Time, the epoch corresponding with the precessional Age of Leo. Were they also, then, the master masons and technologists, the ‘few men far above their fellows’, who oversaw the construction of the Giza pyramids and initiated Egypt’s stoneware technology?¹⁸

DIAMOND-TIPPED SAWS

In addition to his unique findings concerning the advanced techniques, social organisation and ruling elite of the pyramid age, Petrie also began to make other, more unexpected discoveries. He found that the stonecutting processes employed in the design and manufacture of the Giza pyramids, their accompanying temples and the sarcophagi inside them, as well as the many items of stoneware found in abundance within many Old Kingdom tombs, were simply unbelievable.

Petrie, for example, examined the remaining casing stones on the northern side of the Great Pyramid and was simply astonished by the incredible precision involved in their manufacture and placement. The mean thickness of joints between stones was on average 0.5 millimetres, an accuracy rivalling, according to Petrie, the ‘most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length’.¹⁹ Each block weighed a cool 16 tonnes apiece and covered an area of ‘some 35 square feet [3.25 square metres]’, and yet despite their great size the pyramid builders managed to bring them within 0.5 millimetres of each other, even though the joints contained a wafer-thin layer of cement. As Petrie was forced to admit at the time: ‘To merely place such stones in exact contact at the sides would be careful work; but to do so with cement in the joint seems almost impossible.’²⁰

Remning casing stones on the northern side of the Great Pyramid.

The techniques employed in this precision engineering clearly baffled Petrie. Yet once he turned his attentions to the sawing and drilling techniques employed in the preparation of the hard igneous rock used so frequently in Old Kingdom times, he found firm evidence of a sophisticated technology unique to the ancient world. Examining the lidless red granite sarcophagus, or coffer, in the King’s Chamber, for instance, he noted the presence on its outer surface of horizontal and vertical cut-marks that could have been made only by an extremely long saw. He also observed that in the corner of its northern face, near the west side, the saw had run too deep into the hard granite, which had necessitated it being backed out and the process started again. The next cut was still too deep, so the saw had seemingly been backed out and repositioned for a second time. The whole surface had then been polished in an attempt to hide the errors.²¹ Similar saw-marks were also in evidence on the coffer or sarcophagus in the Second Pyramid, as well as on various other cut granite blocks found scattered about the Giza plateau.²²

As the exterior wall of the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber is a full 2.28 metres in length, Petrie concluded that the ‘saw must have been probably about 9 feet [2.7 metres] long’.²³ This is an extraordinary statement for, as Petrie well knew, the only evidence of sawing implements unearthed in Egypt consists of a few bronze knives with serrated edges. These would have had difficulty cutting through a pack of butter, never mind some of the hardest rock in the world.

Egyptologists are not averse to the idea that the masons of Old Kingdom times used bronze saws. Yet in their opinion the sawing of such hard rock was achieved purely through the introduction of a sand-based abrasive that, when placed between the cutting tool and the cutting surface, would grind away the stone, provided, of course, that the correct pressure and sawing action were applied. Petrie accepted that Old Kingdom stonecutters almost certainly used this method to cut softer rocks such as alabaster and limestone, but in his opinion this solution could not account for the sawing processes involved in the cutting of hard igneous rocks such as dark basalt, red granite and black-speckled diorite. After due consideration of the evidence, he proposed that the presumably bronze saws, some up to 2.7 metres long, must have possessed cutting teeth tipped with jewels, and that in his estimate: ‘The character of the work would certainly seem to point to diamond as being the cutting jewel; and only the considerations of its rarity in general, and its absence from Egypt, interfere with this conclusion, and render the tough uncrystallised corundum [i.e. sapphires, rubies or emery] the more likely material.’²⁴

Petrie confirmed the existence of these jewelled cutting points by studying super-hard diorite bowls dating back to the pyramid age. Some of these bore precision-cut hieroglyphs and parallel lines that could have been carved only by an engraving tool with a sharp jewel point. The incisions were always ‘regular and uniform in depth, and equidistant’ with fluctuations ‘no more than such as always occur in the use of a saw by hand-power, whether worked in wood or in soft stone’.²⁵ He also found evidence for the use of circular saws in Old Kingdom times,²⁶ as well as lathes. Yes, lathes. In fact, he concluded that ‘the lathe appears to have been as familiar an instrument in the fourth dynasty, as it is in modern workshops’.²⁷ The lathe, it must be remembered, is a modern invention born out of our understanding of industrial technology.

Strong evidence of lathework in Ancient Egypt comes from beautifully turned diorite bowls, some ‘only as thick as stout card’.²⁸ These display concave surfaces cut using two separate centre points, or axes. Where the two intersecting curves come together, a slight cusp has been left. Such effects, Petrie decided, had nothing whatsoever to do with grinding or scraping. In his opinion these bowls bore the hallmark of a highly sophisticated lathe, ‘fearless and powerful’²⁹ and totally alien to the ancient world.

PRECISION STONEWARE

This was not, however, the last of Petrie’s revelations concerning the stone technology of the Ancient Egyptians, for he also found compelling evidence for a drill that produced tube-like holes in the hardest of rocks. Somehow, the cutting tool revolved to create a thin-walled cylindrical core. Then, when the drill-bit had been removed, this core was broken away to leave a smooth, circular hole. The carvers could bore holes many metres in depth using this method, while the diameter of holes varied between 6 millimetres and 12.5 centimetres.³⁰ As in the case of the straight and circular saws, these tubular drills appear to have employed the use of jewelled cutting points to bore through the rock. The smallest hole found cut into granite was five centimetres in diameter. Anything smaller was found only in softer rocks such as alabaster and limestone. These holes, so Petrie concluded, had been bored probably using a combination of tubular drill and abrasive slurry.³¹

A bore-hole and core stem produced by tubular drilling during the Pyramid age (after Flinders Petrie).

Tubular drills were used in Ancient Egypt for all sorts of purposes. For instance, the granite sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber contains clear evidence that its interior was burrowed out by creating rows of tubular holes. Once the lengthy cores had been broken away, each vertical cusp was flattened and smoothed to remove any evidence of this technique having been used. Some holes, however, would appear to have run too deep and, despite polishing attempts to remove all evidence of their presence, are still visible.³²

Much smaller drills seem to have been used to bore out the interiors of beautifully carved vases made of rocks such as alabaster, breccia, porphyry, serpentine, diorite, rose quartz and even amethyst. There are literally tens of thousands of these exquisite vessels ranging in size from a few centimetres upwards. Many have smooth, hollow interiors with thin walls, burrowed shoulders and long, slim necks with openings sometimes no more than the size of a little finger.

A granite core produced by tubular drilling in Old Kingdom times (after Flinders Petrie).

Initially, Petrie believed that the high level of workmanship involved in the manufacture of these finely polished stone vases suggested they were unique to Old Kingdom times. Then further examples began to surface in much older levels of occupation belonging to the so-called Archaic period, the First and Second Dynasties of Egyptian history, forcing him to revise the time-frame of their development.³³ As time went on, hundreds more stone vases of incredible workmanship started surfacing in a newly excavated cemetery site at Naqada, 480 kilometres (300 miles) south of Cairo. These examples dated back to the so-called Gerzean or Naqada II culture, c. 3500–3100 BC, but by this time Petrie unfortunately had dropped the subject in favour of other, more pressing matters.³⁴ Somehow this style of stoneware had emerged on to the scene almost overnight in around 3500 BC, a fact that has led some scholars to conclude that the technology behind their manufacture, or indeed the vases themselves, came originally from Mesopotamia.³⁵

INVISIBLE EVIDENCE

Scholars have long puzzled over the precision stone-carving techniques employed in Ancient Egypt. Modern Egyptologists still consider that granite items such as the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber were fashioned using copper tools and a simple sand abrasive.³⁶ Petrie never denied that an abrasive was used in the cutting of hard stone and openly admitted that sand had been found in saw-cuts stained green through the use of copper tools.³⁷ What he did deny, however, was whether such techniques could explain the precision cutting, turning and drilling of bowls and vases made of hard rock during Old Kingdom times. In his mind, only the use of much harder, sapphire- or ruby-tipped cutting tools fitted all the criteria set by the evidence at hand. Any rock that equals the hardness of quartz, which is seven on Mohs’ hardness scale, is virtually impossible to tackle using a combination of copper tool and sand abrasive. Using this process to carve, grind, drill and polish beautiful vases made of, say, purple amethyst or pink rose quartz, although by no means impossible, would be thwarted by problems and failure. A much harder cutting tool affixed to a mechanical device is the only realistic solution.

The Egyptological community tends to dismiss Petrie’s views on the use of jewel-tipped tubular drills during the pyramid age. As in the case of straight and circular saws, no evidence for their existence has ever come to light during excavations.³⁸ This is something that Petrie attempted to explain in his own day by stating that: ‘The great saws and drills of the Pyramid workers would be royal property, and it would, perhaps, cost a man his life if he lost one; while the bronze would be remelted, and the jewels reset, when the tools became worn, so that no worn-out tools would be thrown away.’³⁹

Petrie is still a respected hero of early Egyptological exploration. He did much to put the subject on a firm footing by establishing the so-called sequence dating of pottery to discern the ages of different occupational levels at archaeological sites, and he was honoured after his death with the creation of the Petrie Chair of Egyptology at University College, London. He also stopped the ramblings of the ‘pyramidiots’ such as Smyth and Menzies. His exhaustive surveys of the monuments and buildings of the Giza plateau are still seen as authoritative today; indeed, the 1990 edition of his seminal work The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, first published in 1883, includes an update by the ultra-conservative Egyptologist Zahi Hawass of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt.

In spite of the part Petrie played in the pioneering of modern Egyptology, it is also true that Egyptologists today find his assertions regarding sapphire- or ruby-tipped saws, drills and lathes a little embarrassing to say the least. Even the curators of the Petrie Museum in central London, which still houses the tens of thousands of artefacts discovered in Egypt by its founder, refused point-blank to discuss these matters with me, preferring instead either to plead complete ignorance or to refer me to standard textbooks and articles on ancient stone-carving techniques in dynastic Egypt.

DUNN’S HIGH-TECH PHARAOHS

There the matter might have rested had it not been for the entrance into this arena of archaeological conventionalism of an American tool specialist and technologist named Christopher Dunn. Inspired by Petrie’s observations in respect to Egypt’s advanced stone technology, he wrote a speculative article in 1983 entitled ‘Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt’.⁴⁰ By applying his extensive knowledge of tool-making and stonecutting to the mystery, and by consulting unbiased colleagues and work associates, he quickly became convinced of Petrie’s findings concerning the use of jewel-tipped saws and lathes in Old Kingdom times. He also found new evidence to back up these claims after examining building-blocks, sarcophagi and stone vessels at Giza, Saqqara and the Cairo Museum.⁴¹ Dunn, however, did not end his research here, for he went on to make what may well turn out to be one of the most revolutionary discoveries ever in respect to Egypt’s stoneware technology.

Dunn pondered long and hard over certain inexplicable features that Petrie had noted in connection with an assortment of stone items identified as having been created by the drilling processes employed in Old Kingdom times. They can be summed up as follows.

Petrie found that, first, the granite cores produced by tubular drilling always seemed to taper towards the top, i.e. at the point where the drill entered the stone, while the circular wall of the borehole always appeared to be wider at the top.⁴²

Secondly, Petrie noted that on granite cores examined, the jewelled drill-piece left behind perfect grooves that swirled around the circumference to form a regular, symmetrical spiral without waviness or interruption; in one case ‘a groove can be traced, with scarcely an interruption, for a length of four turns’.⁴³

Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, Petrie observed that ‘the [spiralling] grooves are as deep in the quartz as in the adjacent feldspar, and even rather deeper’.⁴⁴ At first reading this might not seem particularly relevant, but to any geologist this is a seemingly impossible statement. Granite is composed of three basic components: quartz, feldspar and mica. Quartz is much harder than feldspar, meaning that a drill should pass through the latter faster than the former. This suggests that the width between each groove should be greater as it passes through the feldspar, not the other way around as Petrie was at pains to point out:

If these [grooves] were in any way produced by loose powder [i.e. abrasive slurry], they would be shallower in the harder substance – quartz: whereas a fixed jewel point would [in Petrie’s opinion] be compelled to plough to the same depth in all the components; and further, inasmuch as the quartz stands out slightly beyond the felspar . . . the groove was thus left even less in depth on the felspar than on the quartz.⁴⁵

What possible process could adequately explain all three of these components found in the tubular drilling of hard granite? This was the task that Christopher Dunn set himself using the extensive knowledge and experience he had accumulated as a tool-maker. Yet before coming up with a possible solution to this problem, he had also to take into account one final observation made by Petrie:

The amount of pressure, shown by the rapidity with which the drills and saws pierced through the hard stones, is very surprising; probably a load of at least a ton[ne] or two was placed on the 4-inch [ten-centimetre] drills cutting in granite. On the granite core, No. 7, the spiral of the cut sinks .100 inch [2.54 millimetres] in the circumference of 6 inches [15.24 centimetres], or 1 in 60, a rate of ploughing out of the quartz and felspar which is astonishing.⁴⁶

Dunn was informed by Donald Rahn of the Rahn Granite Surface Plate Co., Dayton, Ohio, that modern high-tech drills using diamond points rotating at 900 revolutions per minute penetrate into granite at a rate of 25 millimetres in 5 minutes, which works out at 0.0055 of a millimetre per revolution.⁴⁷ If this data were to be applied to Petrie’s calculations, it would suggest that the Ancient Egyptians were, as Dunn quickly realised, ‘able to cut their granite with a feed rate that was 500 times greater [author’s emphasis]’.⁴⁸

This was truly outrageous – the pyramid builders of 4500 years ago could pierce through granite 500 times faster than the best diamond-tipped drill-bits on offer today. What in the world were they using to have achieved such extraordinary results? Certainly not flint tools, or copper drill that necessitated the use of a sand abrasive.

Modern-day tubular drilling process (after Christopher Dunn).

Dunn was understandably mystified by this extraordinary revelation, and so thought long and hard about the whole problem. When he did finally come up with what he took to be a plausible solution that fitted all the criteria set by himself, he could not wait to share his findings. Yet so bizarre was his solution that he dared not voice it publicly until he received separate confirmation of its logic from other technologists to whom he had also posed the same puzzle.

Patiently he waited for their response. Each studied the available facts and, gradually, all except one shook their heads and gave up the challenge, saying it just could not be done. Every day Dunn would ask the final contestant whether he had come up with a solution, only to be told that he was still working on it. At last he came back to Dunn with a look of satisfaction on his face, having decided that he was being coaxed into admitting the impossible, for in his words: ‘They didn’t have machinery like that back then!’⁴⁹

So what was it that both Dunn and his unnamed tool-making colleague had independently realised? What was it that had initially stunned them into silence regarding their assessment of Ancient Egypt’s drilling capabilities?

Petrie had decided that, to enable a tubular drill to advance 2.54 millimetres into granite per revolution, a constant pressure of one to two tonnes would have to be applied. Dunn disagreed, for in his opinion only one method of drilling fitted all the requirements. The pyramid builders had used a process known today as ultrasonic drilling. This is where the introduction of an inaudible, high-pitched sound causes a diamond-tipped drill-bit to vibrate at an incredibly fast rate.

Ultrasonic drilling works on very similar principles to the more bulky jackhammer or pneumatic drill used in the street to penetrate hard surfaces such as concrete or paving-stones – the rapid vibrations cause the cutting tool to continually bore a hole into the rock. This advanced process is employed today by engineers to precision-machine odd-shaped holes in hard, or brittle, substances such as steel, carbides, ceramics and semiconductors. An abrasive slurry or paste is often used to quicken the cutting pace.⁵⁰

The most poignant evidence in support of this theory is that ultrasound allows the drill-bit, which vibrates at a rate of between 19,000 and 25,000 cycles per second, to cut through quartz much faster than the softer feldspar, because quartz resonates at the same rate as the ultrasonic pulses used to cut the stone. As a sympathetic partner, quartz therefore offers less resistance. In the words of Dunn: ‘Instead of resisting the cutting action, as it would when using conventional methods, the quartz would be induced to respond and vibrate in sympathy with the high-frequency waves and amplify the abrasive action as the tool cut through it.’⁵¹

No other drilling method accounts for all of the features found in the granite cores examined by Petrie. Yet to suggest that the pyramid builders used ultrasound to aid jewel-tipped drills to penetrate hard rock is totally inconceivable to any open-minded individual, never mind a scholar or student of Egyptology. The evidence, however, was clear for all to see, alongside the telltale signs suggesting the presence in Ancient Egypt of straight and circular saws bearing diamond-like cutting points and mechanical lathes; all this in a world that orthodox historians tell us did not even possess the wheel. Most striking of all is the fact that such advanced technology has been invented only in the past 200 years, much of it only in the last 50 years. Petrie could not find a solution to the puzzling clues left in the granite cores and boreholes by tubular drills – it has taken a late-twentieth-century technologist to understand them. How much more are we going to establish about the Ancient Egyptians as further advances are made in this field?

Not only must we force ourselves to drastically revise our understanding of Egyptian technology, but the knowledge that sound played a key role in stoneware manufacture begins to make sense of the suggestion by Mas’ūdi that the pyramid builders, and plausibly even the Sphinx-building Elder culture, utilised sound vibration to levitate and transport large blocks of stone. Drilling holes in granite is one thing, but can sound really be used to build walls? Could it be possible that sound once possessed an importance little understood even today? Egypt itself could offer me no further evidence to indicate that our most distant ancestors possessed a form of sound technology alien to our current way of thinking.

Christopher Dunn’s findings were ground-breaking, persuasive and plausible, and in many ways he has simply confirmed the extraordinarily high level of sophistication attained by the pyramid builders, whose own legacy shows a command of geodesy, geography, mathematics, metrology and science the world still strives to understand. Yet as I was soon to realise, legends of sound being used to transport building-blocks and to build walls were not confined to Egypt. Such stories could be found not just in antiquity but also among a near-contemporary culture who would appear to have preserved a profound understanding of sonic technology through to the current century.