Bronze? I thought all they had was copper tools.
We normally think of bronze as an alloy of copper and tin. Tin wasn't easily available to the ancient Egyptians though. They alloyed the locally available copper with arsenic which hardened it into a form of bronze. It was probably somewhat inferior to tin based bronze but still tough enough to use for major stone work.
Partially quarried obelisks have provided evidence that metal tools weren't used for some major stone working tasks. Super hard, river bed, diorite balls were used as hammers to laboriously chip channels in the native rock after which fire heating and water quenching cracked the desired form loose from the parent rock.
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Regards, Marv
Failure is just success in progress
That looks about right - Mediocrates
Jon (Jun 9, 2020)
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