Lately, I have come across a spate of books, videos, talks, and so forth by scientists such as geologists, and technical people such as Mr. Dunn who is a manufacturing engineer having spent a lifetime fabricating and designing parts in the aerospace industry, who have set their knowledge and skills to investigating ancient structures. In the process, many myths about their age and fabrication are being dispelled or overturned. For example, Nassim Haramein, a physicist, has posted videos of his discoveries in Machu Pichu, Peru, about the handling and fitting of enormous blocks of stone with precise curved cornerings and joints between which a credit card cannot be slipped even after thousands of years, or geologist Dr. Robert Schoch who has examined water erosion patterns on the Sphinx and determined that it was first created in an era when the desert was wet, which by some estimates would be 7000-5000 years ago, but which by folkloric legends state that it may be as old as 52,000 years!

 

And here we have an individual who has visited, time and again, ancient Egyptian structures such as the Temple at Luxor, the Great Pyramid at Giza, and several other famous or not-so-famous sites in Egypt, so as to take photographs and measurements, and who has reached a conclusion other than the standard Egyptologists' theory of how these structures were made. Needless to say, his conclusions can be summarized as saying that the proof of their size, symmetry, polish, curvature, measurements, and remaining tool marks simply could not have been achieved using only the primitive tools such as stone hammers and copper chisels espoused by museums and Egyptologists as the devices that have produced these great works.

 

In his book, Dunn moves through chapters in which he helps us fathom the perfect geometrical shapes that were achieved on immense scales, especially the complex curvatures in the pharaohs' crowns and also the capitals of immense columns featuring the goddess Hathor. The book is replete with great illustrations of the ellipses and other mathematical forms found, because Mr. Dunn is a stickler for measurements and pattern precision, including symmetry of ears, lips and noses. Returning many times, crawling deeply into spaces that are narrow, photographing structures at different angles and lighting conditions, and using the tools of his trade to reveal, for example, if any light shows through an otherwise perfect perpendicular surface (it doesn't), he emphasizes that round ball tools could not have carved sharp corners on the insides of granite boxes or capitals. Certain objects such an immense granite block with a perfectly polished concave surface attract his attention, as do strange large boat shaped slots in the ground outside pyramids that he postulates held large-scale machines to whittle these most adamantine of materials.

 

One of his chief conclusions, based upon detailed examination of statues, fallen blocks, carvings, and even some obvious mistakes that are typical when machining, is that hand tools could not have attained the precision, the depth, the facility of what we see 3000 years after their construction.

 

Mr. Dunn has brought his own tools, looked at the rate of carving by hand, the amount of debris that would have to be removed, markings left on surfaces, the entire creation of obelisks, the perfection of symmetry on pyramid ceilings, the lining up of gigantic columns, and so forth, and has brought together all this and more to determine that there is no doubt for him that "exact and robust machine tools existed in prehistory". He has calculated feed rates, continuous spiral grooves, the complexity of cornices, and many other particulars of engineering that remain evidence that the ancients at some point had technology even in some cases greater than our own.

 

His interesting point is that ancient Egypt's long period of building temples, pyramids, and tombs, covered 3000 years in which time it would only be logical that human ingenuity invented better tools and better ways to achieve their perfected goals. As with Haramein's findings in Peru, the older the structure the greater the technological finesse seems to be. This leaves us with a profound mystery regarding previous advanced civilizations before recorded history that have left indubitable evidence of the heights of their mighty achievements.

 

The book for a lay person has passages that are too technical to follow, but the conclusions are clear, and Dunn's writing style is quite readable . Recommended. 4 stars.