Egyptian stone vases are the jars, bowls and vessels that craftsmen in early Egypt carved from stone, ranging from soft travertine to very hard basalt, andesite porphyry, breccia, granite, diorite and gneiss. Hard-stone examples appear from the Predynastic Naqada II period (about 3600 to 3200 BCE) and continue through the Early Dynastic period into the Old Kingdom. They were hollowed with copper tube drills, sand abrasive and stone borers, and how precisely that could be done has been argued over since Flinders Petrie described a granite drill core, his "No. 7", in 1883.
It matters because this is one of the few lost-technology debates that measurement can settle: the objects can be scanned, and the known tools can be rebuilt and tested. Since 2023 high-resolution 3D scanning has split researchers into two camps: those who say some vases are too precise for hand methods, and those who say the most precise pieces have no secure ancient context. This guide sets out both sides, what is settled and how Billy Carson reads it.
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What are Egyptian stone vases and when were they made?
Egyptian stone vases are among the commonest finds in elite Predynastic and Early Dynastic tombs, and they mark the first great flowering of Egyptian craft. The earliest stone vessels in Egypt go back to the Late Neolithic, but the hard-stone tradition takes off in Naqada II, when basalt jars begin to appear in graves. By the First and Second Dynasties workshops were producing bowls and jars in decorative stones including black-and-white andesite porphyry, red-and-white breccia and anorthosite gneiss.
Most vessels were made of softer travertine (often sold as "alabaster"), which copper and stone chisels can shape in days. A basalt or granite vessel could take many months, and the finest pieces show thin walls, narrow necks opening into wide interiors and surfaces that look turned rather than carved. That combination is what draws engineers' attention today.
The Step Pyramid hoard: tens of thousands of vessels
The largest single find of Egyptian stone vessels came from the galleries beneath the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, built around 2650 BCE. Two unrobbed galleries along the eastern shafts were packed with vessels, and the numbers cited vary with the source: some give at least 30,000 vessels weighing around 90 tonnes, while others put the total at more than 40,000. Most are travertine, but hard-stone pieces are included.
Many vessels carry incised names of earlier First and Second Dynasty kings, among them Den, Semerkhet, Nynetjer and Sekhemib. Egyptologists read this as Djoser reburying the grave goods of royal ancestors, so many vessels were already old when sealed under his pyramid. The complex itself is covered in the Saqqara guide to the Step Pyramid and the Serapeum, and hard-stone working at scale runs through the guide to how the Great Pyramid was built.
What Petrie found: tube drills, saws and core No. 7
Petrie concluded that the Egyptians cut hard stone with bronze saws and tube drills set with fixed jewel cutting points, and core No. 7 was his main evidence. In The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (1883), chapter 19, "Mechanical Methods of the Pyramid Builders", he described straight saws, circular saws, tubular drills and lathes from cut blocks, coffers and offcuts at Giza.
Core No. 7 is a granite core broken from a drill hole. Petrie wrote that its grooves "form a regular spiral" that is "truly symmetrical with the axis of the core", and that in one place a single groove could be traced "for a length of four turns". He also noted that the grooves were as deep in the quartz as in the softer feldspar beside it. A loose abrasive, he reasoned, would cut the harder quartz less deeply, so the evidence pointed to fixed cutting points, which he thought were most likely corundum, possibly diamond.
He was also struck by the speed. "On the granite core, No. 7, the spiral of the cut sinks .1 inch in the circumference of 6 inches, or 1 in 60," he wrote, calling the rate "astonishing", and he estimated that "at least a ton or two" of load bore down on four-inch drills cutting granite. In the same chapter Petrie argued that Old Kingdom diorite bowls were made by "true turning" on a lathe, pointing to a bowl that had been knocked off centre and re-centred. He did not propose powered machinery, but his language of saws, drills and lathes has framed the debate ever since.
The "precision beyond hand tools" argument
The case for advanced tooling holds that the cutting rates and symmetry seen on Egyptian hard stone go beyond what copper, sand and muscle can deliver. Its best-known advocate is the engineer and machinist Christopher Dunn, whose book The Giza Power Plant (1998) revisited Petrie's measurements. Dunn argued that the feed rate implied by the spiral on core No. 7 was too high for a copper tube and abrasive and proposed ultrasonic drilling as a better fit, folding this into his larger thesis that the Great Pyramid was a machine for converting vibration into energy.
Mainstream Egyptology has not accepted the ultrasonic reading or the power-plant thesis, but Dunn's approach, applying a machinist's tolerances to ancient stone, frames most of the recent vase scans. It sits alongside other lost-technology cases on this site, such as the Antikythera mechanism and the Baghdad battery, where the question is likewise what the evidence requires.
What experimental archaeology has shown
Experimental archaeology has shown that Egyptian tools, rebuilt and used by hand, can drill and hollow granite and other hard stones, and can leave spiral grooves like Petrie's. The key work is by Denys Stocks. In papers in Antiquity in 1993 ("Making stone vessels in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt") and 2001 ("Testing ancient Egyptian granite-working methods in Aswan, Upper Egypt"), and in Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt (2003, second edition 2022), Stocks tested more than two hundred reconstructed and replica tools. Copper tube drills charged with quartz sand cut granite, and stone borers driven by a weighted hand drill with sand abrasive opened out vessel interiors. Tomb paintings such as those in the Theban tomb of the vizier Rekhmire show vase makers alongside other craftsmen at work.
The grooves themselves were tested earlier. In 1983 Leonard Gorelick and A. John Gwinnett published "Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling: An Experimental Perspective on a Scholarly Disagreement" in the Penn Museum's Expedition magazine. They found that loose sand and crushed quartz with a copper tube left no concentric lines on granite, but emery, a natural corundum-rich abrasive, did when used wet or with oil. Their conclusion was that spiral grooves do not require fixed jewel teeth, let alone machines, although they did vindicate Petrie's point that quartz sand alone does not explain them.
None of this means the work was easy. Hard-stone vessels could take a year or more each, and Stocks acknowledged that some vessels show a precision beyond what is normally expected from hand tools. More recently the group Scientists Against Myths spent several years making vessels with only "stone and stick" tools.
The scanning debate: UnchartedX, the Artifact Foundation and Fomitchev-Zamilov
The modern debate began in January 2023, when UnchartedX, the channel run by researcher Ben van Kerkwyk, released "Scanning a Predynastic Granite Vase to 1000th of an Inch". Metrologists Alex Dunn and Nick Sierra had analysed a structured-light scan of a rose-granite vase owned by collector Adam Young, and reported symmetry, flatness and concentricity at the level of thousandths of an inch. Young now runs the Artifact Foundation, which with collectors including Matt Beall has scanned dozens of vessels and reports recurring geometric proportions that, it argues, imply turning about a fixed axis.
The most detailed published response came from physicist Max Fomitchev-Zamilov of Maximus Energy Corporation. In "A metrological method for manufacturing quality assessment and classification of ancient Egyptian stone vessels", published in npj Heritage Science on 16 December 2025, he scanned 19 predynastic vessels, mostly basalt, at the Petrie Museum in London with a Keyence VL-500 scanner. He compared them with 25 modern lathe-made and 24 contemporary handmade vessels using a metric built on circularity and concentricity. The machine-made pieces formed a tight cluster of their own, while the provenanced predynastic vessels were, in his words, "virtually indistinguishable" from modern handmade objects. He concluded that the Petrie vessels were handmade, with outer surfaces likely ground against a block, possibly with a hand crank, and interiors hollowed with boring bars and quartz sand.
In 2026 Fomitchev-Zamilov went further, arguing in interviews and articles that no provenanced vase yet analysed matches the most precise privately held pieces, and that those pieces are consistent with modern manufacture. He crowdfunded replicas, turned on a lathe by a Chinese stoneworking company and finished with power tools, to show the same circularity can be produced today.
UnchartedX rejects this as premature. In a post of 20 May 2026, "Ancient Precision Vases are Fakes Again?", van Kerkwyk argued that circularity is too narrow a measure, ignoring wall-thickness consistency and geometric design. He wrote that the Petrie Museum holds "Petrie's teaching stock" rather than the finest pieces, that the Artifact Foundation has "scanned over 100 artifacts now", including at larger museums, and that its own Petrie Museum scans found a jar with internal circularity within a thousandth of an inch. On provenance, he cited two precise vases whose dealer documentation records them as "acquired from the Teddy Kollek collection in the 1960s". He also conceded the obvious: "Of COURSE we could make them today", arguing that the real question is how ancient makers achieved it.
What is settled and what is still open
What is settled is that Egyptians drilled, sawed and ground hard stone with copper tools, sand and harder abrasives, and stone borers, in enormous volume. Petrie's cores, the Djoser hoard and repeated experiments agree on that.
What remains open is narrower. One question is how good the best ancient work really was, which needs scans of larger, provenanced museum collections with published methods. The other is provenance. The most precise vases discussed online come from private collections without excavation records, and the antiquities market has held forgeries since at least the mid-1800s. Until an excavated vessel is shown to match the private pieces, the strongest claims rest on objects whose age cannot be independently confirmed. Equally, missing provenance does not prove a piece is modern.
Billy Carson's reading
Billy Carson holds that predynastic precision stonework points to advanced tools inherited from an earlier civilisation, not to a gradual development of copper-and-sand craft. He explores this in "Lost Ancient Technology of Egypt: Precision Stonework & Advanced Tools – Pre-Dynastic Times" with guest Mohamed Ibrahim, and in the related podcast episode, The Lost Technology of Ancient Egypt with Mohamed Ibrahim, released in June 2024. His conversation with Christopher Dunn on the 4biddenknowledge Podcast Network covers the engineering side of the same argument.
Carson's view fits his wider reading of Egypt: that dynastic Egypt inherited or restored knowledge older than itself, a theme he develops through the Emerald Tablets in his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets and in his commentary on the Khafre radar claims and the underground structures at Giza.
Readers should weigh this against the evidence above: experimental archaeology shows the known toolkit could make hard-stone vessels, and the only peer-reviewed metrology study of provenanced predynastic vessels found them consistent with handwork. Carson's position is that the most precise pieces still need explaining, and the 2026 exchange between Fomitchev-Zamilov and UnchartedX shows that question remains open.
Watch, read and go deeper
On 4BK TV, Egyptian Mystery School gathers Carson's teaching on Egyptian knowledge and its origins. The podcast episode with Mohamed Ibrahim is the audio companion to the video on this page. For the monuments behind the vessels, read the Saqqara and Great Pyramid guides above, and start at the Ancient Egypt topic hub for the full collection.
Frequently asked questions
How did the ancient Egyptians make stone vases?
They shaped the outside by chiselling and grinding, then hollowed the inside with sand-fed copper tube drills and stone borers turned by a weighted hand drill. Denys Stocks has reproduced these methods in hard stone.
What is Petrie's core No. 7?
It is a granite core from a tube-drilled hole that Flinders Petrie collected at Giza and described in The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (1883). Its spiral groove, which sinks about one inch in sixty around the circumference, led Petrie to argue for fixed jewel cutting points and heavy drill pressure. Later experiments showed that a loose emery abrasive can also produce such grooves.
Are the precise Egyptian stone vases fake?
That is unresolved. Max Fomitchev-Zamilov argues the most precise privately held vases are consistent with modern machining, while UnchartedX and the Artifact Foundation point to museum scans and dealer records reaching back to the 1960s. The deciding evidence would be a precise vessel with a documented excavation context.
How many stone vessels were found under the Step Pyramid?
Tens of thousands. Sources cite figures from at least 30,000 to more than 40,000 vessels from the galleries beneath Djoser's pyramid, mostly travertine, many inscribed with the names of earlier kings.
Did the Egyptians use lathes?
Petrie believed Old Kingdom diorite bowls were turned, and modern studies link rotary abrasion marks to hand-driven turning devices. Whether some predynastic vessels required more precise fixed-axis turning is the core of the current scanning debate.
Sources and further reading
- W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (1883), chapter 19, "Mechanical Methods of the Pyramid Builders"
- Christopher Dunn, The Giza Power Plant (1998)
- Leonard Gorelick and A. John Gwinnett, "Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling: An Experimental Perspective on a Scholarly Disagreement", Expedition 25:3 (1983)
- Denys A. Stocks, "Making stone vessels in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt", Antiquity (1993)
- Denys A. Stocks, Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt (2003; second edition 2022)
- Max Fomitchev-Zamilov, "A metrological method for manufacturing quality assessment and classification of ancient Egyptian stone vessels", npj Heritage Science (2025)
- Ben van Kerkwyk (UnchartedX), "Ancient Precision Vases are Fakes Again?" (2026)
