Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

Petrie examined the sarcophagus particularly closely and reported that it must have been cut out of its surrounding granite block with straight saws ‘8 feet or more in length’. Since the granite was extremely hard, he could only assume that these saws must have had bronze blades (the hardest metal then supposedly available) inset with ‘cutting points’ made of even harder jewels: ‘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 …’10 An even bigger mystery surrounded the hollowing out of the sarcophagus, obviously a far more difficult enterprise than separating it from a block of bedrock. Here Petrie concluded that the Egyptians must have: adapted their sawing principle into a circular instead of a rectilinear form, curving the blade round into a tube, which drilled out a circular groove by its rotation; thus by breaking away the cores left in such grooves, they were able to hollow out large holes with a minimum of labour. These tubular drills varied from ¼ inch to 5 inches diameter, and from 1/30 to 1/5 inch thick …11 Of course, as Petrie admitted, no actual jewelled drills or saws had ever been found by Egyptologists.12 The visible evidence of the kinds of drilling and sawing that had been done, however, compelled him to infer that such instruments must have existed. He became especially interested in this and exten...