There were many legends about the biblical king of Solomon in the ancient world. They all agreed that during the reign of the wise king peace and prosperity came between Egypt, Israel and Mesopotamia.
During this period of prosperity, in 950 BC, Solomon began to build a temple, which later became famous for its splendor and beauty.
At the very beginning of construction, the tsarist engineers faced a difficult task: how to build a huge building without touching the stones with any iron tools?
The fact is that Solomon, remembering the words of Yahweh himself, once said to the prophet Moses on Mount Sinai ("And build there an altar to the Lord thy God, an altar of stones, without lifting iron on them"), ordered to erect a temple without touching his iron so as not to defile him.
Looking for a tool
Legend tells that the sages pointed out to Solomon the precious stones in the breastplates of the high priests. These gems were cut and polished by some instrument even harder than themselves. Shamir - that was how it was called. Shamir was able to cut through what no iron could give.
Since the priests themselves did not know anything about the stones, Solomon summoned the spirits, and they opened the way for him to the shamir and declared that the shamir is … a worm that is no larger than a grain of barley, but possesses such power that even the hardest a rock.
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The Hebrew Dictionary explains the word “shamir” by its Egyptian origin. In the Bible, it means nothing more than a diamond, which seems quite natural. However, it is known from archaeological materials that only crystalline quartz (or rock crystal) was available to the ancient Egyptians as cutting tools. They did not use the diamond because they knew nothing about it.
Nevertheless, at the very beginning of the 20th century, in the town of Abusir on the left bank of the Nile, archaeologists unearthed the remains of the pyramid of Pharaoh Sahura, who ruled during the heyday of the Old Kingdom (about the 25th century BC).
In exceptionally hard rocks (granite, basalt, diorite, whose hardness on the Mohs scale is 8.5 out of 10), from which the pyramid was built, the researchers found precisely drilled holes made at the same angle. In total, there are over 30 such drill holes.
Following the example of ancestors
At the same time, the English archaeologist Flinders Petrie drew attention to the stone-cutting technique of the ancient Egyptians. “When drilling granite,” wrote Petri, “a load of at least 2 tons acted on the drills, since in the granite core the pitch of the spiral marks left by the cutting tool is 2.5 mm with a hole circumference of 15 cm … Such geometry of spiral marks cannot be explained nothing but feeding the drill under a huge load …"
Thus, drilling in Abusir, that is, core drilling of rocks, can only be explained by the use of technology similar to ours. But even the most skilled drillers of the times of the Old Kingdom could not have done such a thing, because they used only the copper tools available to them - a hand drill and a chisel.
However, there is no doubt: to perform complex drilling operations, some specially designed equipment was used.
Petrie had no explanation for this riddle. He also could not explain with what instrument the hieroglyphs were carved on diorite bowls of the 4th dynasty (about 5 thousand years old), which he found in Giza.
In Egyptian museums, you can see a large number of vessels dating back to ancient times and carved from the hardest rocks. Over 30 thousand pieces of stone ware were found under the step pyramid of Djoser in Sakkara (jugs, vases, plates and other utensils). The found vessels demonstrate the highest quality of workmanship.
But a tool has not yet been invented that could carve vases of this shape, because it must be narrow enough to crawl through the neck, and strong enough so that it could be used to machine shoulders and surfaces rounded along the radius from the inside.
Today, traces of the “divine instrument” have been found in other cultures, but we can hardly understand what it really was, because after completing the work, as a rule, the master takes the instrument with him …
Mikhail EFIMOV, magazine "Mysteries of History" No. 42 2016