–“It’s crazy to think the Egyptians carved on granite thousands of years ago”–
Not when you understand what harder rocks, heat, sand, and acid do to rock. 😉
If you learn to sculpt it will include a pointed chisel and a rake chisel. a very hard rock on a slightly softer rock (granite) will produce small predictable indentations just like a pointed steel chisel. A steel, iron, bronze, copper alloy, copper, or rock chisel differ only in the size and rate of removal. On the other hand it’s actually easier and takes less skill to just have a rock hammer with a rounded and not overly large end, on the end of a handle to just rapidly tap divots into the stone. And because you’re taking off consistent bits of stone (pulverizing it really), from a consistent material, it’s relatively eays and NOT difficult. it’s just time consuming and the ancient egyptians had food and population and time. 😉
If you want to pull stone from a quarry, you just build little fires and then hit it with a rock and you pull out regular but larger segments of stone.
If you want to drill a hole in stone you create a bronze or copper sheet, fold it into a round tube, pour in sand (or a tiny aggregate of a harder stone) and water, (or oil) and then use a rope back and fort to drill. It takes three or five men but it’s not complicated, and it’s a lot faster than you’d think.
If you want to finish stone you can use both sand ‘sand leather or sand cloth’. And if you happen to have access to a mine where acids form, you can use that too (south american in particular).
We forget sometimes these people were just coming out of the stone age and their undestanding of rock was culturally deep.
Just as contemporary art is largely sh*t because we can’t afford to put time into it – ancient art is great because EMPIRES could afford to put human time and effort into it.
It really is that simple.
ps: What’s older? The pyramids or stonehenge? Stonehenge is older than the pyramids. Stonehenge was erected around 3100 BC, while the first pyramid was built around 2600 BC. Though what we see today was erected about contemporaneously with the pyramids. And gobekli tepe is much older at around 10,000BC
Cheers
Curt Doolittle The Natural Law Institute The Science of Cooperation