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- [00:02]
A
When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite obey your thirst.
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B
So good, so good, so good.
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A
Give big, save big with Rack Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack. For a limited time, take an extra 40% off red tag clearance for everyone on your list. All sales final and restrictions apply. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today. To me it's like this is all pointing to something strange.
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B
If they were holding some sacred psychedelics or like random sacred liquids, they wanted the containers to be perfect or they had the tools which allowed them to make these easily.
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A
This is Kwe Poka, an electrical engineer, lifelong Egypt enthusiast, and one of the first people to ever apply modern laser and CT scanning to ancient Egyptian stone vessels. And what he found challenges. Everything that we think we know about early human technology, we're talking about granite and dorite vases carved from a single block of stone objects dated to pre dynastic Egypt before the age of the pharaohs. Some are so perfectly circular they deviate the just 16 microns. Far more precise than what modern CNC machines can reliably produce today. In this conversation, Caraway walks us through museum scans from London, Turin and beyond. And he explains why flint tools don't account for the tool marks. And he even reveals why modern manufacturers struggle to copy these shapes. Were these vessels made with lost machines, hand guided lathes or technology that we just no longer have? So if you are a fan of lost ancient technology, advanced science, civilizations from the past and the mysteries that they hide, well, this is the episode for you. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Camp. Caraway. How are you, sir?
- [02:15]
B
Thank you, I'm fine.
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A
Thank you so much for.
- [02:17]
B
I'm a bit tired, but it's okay.
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A
You're a bit tired?
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B
Yeah.
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A
Where'd you just travel from?
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B
Switzerland.
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A
Oh, straight from Switzerland.
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B
Yeah.
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A
When did you land?
- [02:27]
B
Two days ago.
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A
Okay.
- [02:28]
B
I had several meetings with my friend here in New York and.
- [02:31]
A
Yeah, and you got to acclimate a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [02:34]
B
I didn't have much time to sleep actually, so.
- [02:36]
A
Okay, well we're going to, we're going to dive into, you know, one of my favorite historical artifacts. We're going to solve maybe the greatest mystery ever, how exactly these things were made. Okay. I'm going to Come up with my own theories. I know you might not speculate, but I'm going to, we're going to figure it out. But in the meantime, can you explain to the people who you are, what kind of work you do and what these beautiful vases in front of us are?
- [02:59]
B
Yeah, sure. So my name is Karoj Poka. I'm from Hungary originally and I'm an electrical engineer. I have been always fascinated by ancient Egypt, basically since I'm a kid or when I was a kid, I made presentations in school about Tutankhamun and these kind of topics, mummification. And I started to watch Unchartedx like a few years back. I had a quite boring job. And yeah, I listened to Joe Rogan podcasts where Ben from UnchartedX explained these out of place artifacts. I was always a bit skeptical about those, but when I saw the vase topic, they started to actually, my friend Adam Young started to collect these vases. Here we have this, they call it the OG vase. It's made out of granite and it's extremely precise if you're talking about circularity. So for example, the median circularity of this object is 6,10,000 of an inch, which is extremely, extremely precise.
- [04:15]
A
Now the OG vase, who has possession of it?
- [04:18]
B
Adam. Adam purchased it and he started to scan it. Basically he brought it to a defense contractor and they scanned it with structured light first and then it went into CT scanning different, other type of scanning.
- [04:35]
A
Now just explain to me the history of these vases. Like this OG vase. You know, there's pottery all over the ancient world. Egypt is no exception. You know, there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of pieces of pottery, either full pieces or fragments. What makes these unique?
- [04:50]
B
These are unique because they're made out of hard stone and not pottery. So usually the material is granite, diorite, sometimes basalt. Actually, a lot of times we see basalt vases.
- [05:06]
A
And the difference being that a pottery vase would be a piece of clay that's thrown down onto a lathe or a wheel and then spun and then formed into this type of shape and then heated. And then once it's heated, it'll actually cure into a, you know, a hard vase that can be used to transport grain or water. But these vases, the OG vase, are not made out of clay. They're made out of one singular piece of hard stone.
- [05:32]
B
Yeah, and they are carved.
- [05:34]
A
They're carved.
- [05:35]
B
They are basically made out of one single piece of stone, which in order.
- [05:40]
A
To one, get perfect circularity or two, to even create something that is so much wider at the middle than it is at the top of the bottom with carving would be exceptionally difficult.
- [05:55]
B
Yes, it is. It's actually rivals modern, modern precision and tolerances in some of the cases, especially with the OG that was the first ways they examined and actually turned out to be that precise. And then I've seen this video and the result or the response from the mainstream was like, yeah, they are modern fakes. Probably the Provenance is not 100% sure when they were made, who made them, where were they found? And I had this idea to, okay, then collect all the museums in Europe with significant Egyptian collection. And then I started to email them. Can I come in as an engineer, investigate these vases? I will bring my own equipment, et cetera, et cetera. And the Petrie Museum in London, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London responded very kindly and they offered me two appointments. It happened last year, October. And also the Museo Akizio in Turin, there's the second largest Egyptian museum after Cairo. They were also open for this research. And then I went on the trip with Ben on his trip, actually on the uncharted trip to Egypt and I met Adam. So that's how we connected and that's how our story began.
- [07:15]
A
So these vases that are effectively created of one piece of hard granite, they're effectively what most I guess archaeologists would believe are like kind of cut or bore out or something like that. Like, I would love to go through the official story as well. What is the prevailing theory as to how these were made?
- [07:33]
B
Currently, the broadly accepted theory is that they were made with flint tools. Actually, I think you have one here with flint tools attached to some wooden mechanism and they were like turned inside a ways by hand, no machines, which is. Well, you can do it to an extent. But I'm quite skeptical about these tolerances. If you can achieve those tolerances, you can achieve perfect circle with a compass. If you turn a compass around, yes, you will have a perfect circle. But you have to hold onto these pieces somehow because these are very small ones. But in the British Museum there are huge ones. So you have to hold on to those somehow because the original material, obviously it's a bigger boulder, it's like a bigger rock. So this theory seems to be not complete to me.
- [08:37]
A
Okay, so I'm going to get into your theory in a second. But I'm curious, where were these found? They're found in Egypt.
- [08:43]
B
In Egypt mostly in a lot of tens of thousands of these were found under the Step Pyramid.
- [08:48]
A
Tens of thousands?
- [08:49]
B
Yes. Mixed like Alabaster, hearthstone, and also some pottery. But I think we can say that there are hundreds of thousands of these vases just spread all around the world. Different museums, different private collectors. Because if I'm not mistaken, before the 70s, like, diplomats were also getting those as a gift, basically. And yeah, you can find those in private collections. That's how you can basically purchase these on the antiquities market. Those who were brought out from Egypt before this new rule, they are free to be out of Egypt, let's say.
- [09:38]
A
That makes sense. Now, do we have any idea what these would have been used for in their historical setting?
- [09:44]
B
Different liquids you think they served a functional purpose for? That's the mainstream explanation.
- [09:52]
A
Okay, that's clear. So the mainstream explanation is that these would have been used for different types of oils or liquids, maybe perfumes or something that would be carried around, that you needed some type of hard, fully waterproof apparatus to carry it in.
- [10:05]
B
Yeah, I fancy the idea that maybe they were holding some kind of sacred liquid and that's why they wanted to make these that precise. But I just don't understand why it has to be so round if they can make a pottery, if they can make it in an easier way, why you have to go through with all this hustle to make something that round. And these are not that round, like the Ogee. The Ogee is an exceptional piece. We found similar roundness values. But these are the collections from the. Or the best ones from the Petrie Museum we have scanned. And yeah, in the museum, for example, that was Sir William Flinders Petrie's teaching collection, basically. So Flinders Petrie was the first amongst the first archaeologists who basically tried to investigate these systematically. He measured things. He was a surveyor and engineer. He measured a lot of things in Egypt and he got to the conclusion that these has to be turned on some kind of spindle or mechanism. Because you can see tool marks in the inside of these vases.
- [11:27]
A
Oh, really?
- [11:27]
B
Yeah, the outside is polished, but in the inside you can see, for example, if you look at the OG vase, I can show you, and you can see those lines, basically concentric lines, let's say. Oh, wow, those are actual tool marks.
- [11:46]
A
If this was done by hand, it would perhaps be, you know, vertical kind of tool marks or something like that. Like these are very, very uniform, very organized horizontal tool marks from the bottom all the way to the top.
- [11:59]
B
Yeah.
- [12:00]
A
If it was done through, you know, what is the commonly accepted mainstream explanation? It would seem as though the tool marks would appear different. Is that fair to say?
- [12:09]
B
Yeah, it would be Less homogeneous or uniform. Yeah.
- [12:14]
A
Okay, so I think at this point the audience has an understanding of what the story is. Right. You have hundreds of thousands of these potentially that are discovered, specifically tens of thousands discovered under the step pyramid. They are almost perfectly circular.
- [12:28]
B
They are not all of them. So we have to say that not every Waze is like the OG ways. The OG gets his name because it was the original gangster ways. Like seeing these tolerances first on this was extraordinary.
- [12:44]
A
Right. But many of them have just remarkable circularity.
- [12:48]
B
Yes.
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A
And they are made out of one.
- [12:50]
B
Solid piece of granite or basalt or diorite or porphyry. Yeah. Very hard stones.
- [12:55]
A
Very hard stone, yeah. And the story that is kind of told is that they were made by craftsmen that would go in, spend a long time, potentially months, to just bore out years, potentially years to basically use simple flintstones to kind of break out the interior of these vases. And then they were used for transporting oils or something like that. But for some reason they're perfectly round and extremely resilient and strong.
- [13:23]
B
And it's very important part of the story that these are coming from the pre dynastic era of Egypt. So before the Egyptian era, dynastic, let's say kingdom, or before the pharaohs. Before the age of the pharaohs, which that's significant. There were several cultures before Egypt. I mean, before the dynastic Egyptians. Most of these are coming from the Nagada culture. These were living in that area between 3500 and 3100 BC.
- [14:01]
A
Wow. I mean. Yeah, that's wild. So you have the New Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the Old Kingdom. And these predate the Old Kingdom.
- [14:10]
B
Yes, exactly. And you never seen. You barely seen these vases made later. Probably they were inherited and some pharaoh kept it and passed it along the family line. But you don't really see those after these. In the Old Kingdom, Joseph Farrow came and he had the magnificent engineering, Imhotep and they figured out how to make the alabaster raises. Actually, that process is documented perfectly. And you can see the same technique applied there, which works because alabaster is a much softer stone, but the same technique is a little bit. Yeah, let's say suspicious with these types of hard stones.
- [15:00]
A
That's interesting. So are these potentially older than the pyramids or roughly around the same time older? Wow. I mean, it's a really remarkable piece of engineering to be older than the pyramids. It's pretty. Pretty wild.
- [15:14]
B
Yes.
- [15:15]
A
And so if someone wanted to make this today, let's say there was a skilled artisan that wanted to make this today using, you know, the old kingdom Egyptian method, or, you know, not the old Kingdom, actually the pre dynastic Egyptian method. Would it be possible to do?
- [15:33]
B
I'm not a stonemason, but it would be extremely difficult. There were some attempts to do this. Are you familiar with the Scientist Against Myth channel?
- [15:45]
A
I don't know if I am. Is it a YouTube channel?
- [15:47]
B
Yeah. They are trying to debunk all these alternative history stuff and theories and. And they spent two years on making a vase out of diorite, I think, or granite. And they built like wooden machines and they only used rudimental tools. But in my opinion, they cheated. At one point when they put the vase on a spindle, like a modern potter's wheel with metal bearings, and they tried to highlight the high points in circularity and mark those with a pencil and then remove those high points. So they achieved, actually very nice. I think the result was amazing. Here you can see the OG ways. It's a heat map. It's a comparison. On the right, you can see the OG ways in the middle. The best piece from the Petri Museum we found. I will talk about it in more details. And the heat map represents basically the surface deviation between the scan and the reconstructed perfect CAD model of these vases. So the way we analyze these is to align them. There is a special elaborate process to align these vases perfectly to global Z axis. And then we slice them up into very, very thin, few micron high slices and then fit perfect circles on these slices. And we measure the actual deviation of these scan data points from the perfect circle. And we can basically tell what's the median or average deviation of these. We use the root mean square distance error. It's a mathematical formula basically telling in one number how these points per slice are deviating from the perfect circle. And then we have tons of like thousands of slices per vase, and we pick the median value of these root mean square distance values. And here you can see the CAD model against the mesh, basically the 3D scan. So we build a CAD model of these perfect slices and we compare how much the scan deviates from this perfect model.
- [18:21]
A
I mean, it seems like the scientist against myth one looks great, but it has far more deviations than even the OG vase or the Petri Museum vase.
- [18:29]
B
Yeah, so the red part is like a positive deviation in surface. The green is perfect, like close to.
- [18:37]
A
Zero, like a golf green. You can kind of get an idea of what the geography of, like, you know, where the hole is based off of the Heat.
- [18:44]
B
Yeah, exactly. And the blue is a negative, like a dent or something. And yeah, the Scientists Against Mist did a great job, but they claimed it's even more precise than some of these vases. They measured also something in Russia. They are. I think they are based in Russia, and they measured a vase there in a Russian museum with mechanical calipers. And in my opinion, as an engineer, it was not a scientific, real scientific measurement. We did laser scan and CT scan these, which is giving you a much more precise representation of the actual object.
- [19:24]
A
Right. And they let you scan it.
- [19:26]
B
They made it freely available.
- [19:29]
A
I see.
- [19:31]
B
Or open to the public, but we don't know what was the technology, how did they scan it? Exactly. I see.
- [19:38]
A
So even in spite of that, it seems like the OG vase and the Petri vase are actually more perfect than the, you know, the Scientists Against Myths vase.
- [19:46]
B
Yeah. If you're talking about median circularities, the Scientist against myths is around 110 microns. The middle vase is around 72 microns, and the OG is 16.
- [19:57]
A
Wow.
- [19:58]
B
And the human hair is around 80 micron. So it's like a fraction of a human hair in precision.
- [20:05]
A
I mean, remarkable. Okay. So once the scanning software comes on the scene, we get a different look at these vases that no one has ever really looked at before. And probably for many decades, people just kind of looked at these and they're like, oh, yeah, they're pretty cool. You know, they carved them out. They're great artisans. But the scanning technology actually shows us a. A bit of a different story as to why these are so spectacular and why they call the. I guess, the mainstream narrative into question. Is that fair to say?
- [20:34]
B
Yes, because after scanning it, we can. We actually developed the software for analyzing them, and we can tell mathematically how precise and what the tolerances are. And sometimes when you're just looking at the vase, it has a camouflage by just the texture. It has the natural stone texture hiding those imperfections. So as you can see here, when we are building up the scan, it actually shows you a different picture of the vase without the colors, without the. The texture. And after we have this scanned, we can put it in a. In our. In our software and we can crunch these numbers.
- [21:28]
A
Fascinating. I mean, yeah, the scanning here is crazy. It's cool. The museums let you do this. Yeah, they let you come in, actually handle them. I mean, they're not very fragile, I presume. Like, obviously they're ancient, but they're still fairly strong.
- [21:42]
B
Yes, they are very strong. Probably almost. I wouldn't say indestructible. But yeah, they are. We had to handle them very carefully. So as you can see, we had this pad under everything. We had to hold it by two hands over the table. And the museum staff said that they never seen this kind of tech in a museum setup because no one analyzed it before us basically this deeply. We were the first in history to go into museums and apply high tech scanning technology.
- [22:20]
A
When it comes to actually scanning these vases, we're seeing a different kind of image. Like there are with the OG vase specifically, there are perfect tolerances. It's almost completely flush. It's remarkable that it was made 5,000 years ago. Potentially more. What confidence do we have that this vase, the OG vase, is from that specific time period? And can you tell me about some of the deviations of the vases from each other?
- [22:48]
B
Yes. So the OG Adam could talk about that more. He has the provenance, paper and everything of that vase. But if I'm not mistaken, it could be traced back to the 1800s when it was given to Czechoslovakian diplomat or someone. But we don't really know where was it before that. But just based on the fact how it looks like, how it's. So it's. You can see very similar objects in the, in the Egyptian museums. But I think it's attributed to the same culture, the Nagada culture, the pre dynastic culture officially. But that was the reason why we went into museums or reached out to museums to scan vases with real provenance. And actually I can show you how it looks like with a few museums and for example, with the most precise vases we found. This is what you see on their website. You can see the description any previous publication. It appeared in some kind of production, estimated production period, like Nagada 2. There were three eras of this culture, Nagada I, II and III. Sometimes it's not clear, they don't know because you cannot date stone. You can date the grave they found it in, but you cannot date the stone itself. But for example, this is this little ball. It's actually remarkable how they made this very round. It's like spinning. And in few cases you have very precise provenance of which grave they found it in. It's documented precisely who found it where and in which grave. But it's a big question where they inherited and they put it in their graves with them, buried it with them, or they made it.
- [25:01]
A
I mean the OG vase, for example, like that. The fact that it has providence all the way to the 1800s, that would mean that it is either Authentic from the period because it looks like similar stone, it looks like similar things found of that period. Or. Or it was a fabrication that was made in the late 1700s.
- [25:19]
B
You cannot really reach that level of extremely unlikely.
- [25:23]
A
Yes.
- [25:24]
B
Or you can do it, but it would be so expensive to do it that it would not be a good deal.
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A
I mean, at the time, these things were given as gifts for free.
- [25:37]
B
Yeah. Even a hundred years ago or 50 years ago, they did worse. 200 bucks or a few hundred bucks, you could purchase those. So the price went up, but it.
- [25:47]
A
Would take potentially months to fabricate them, or maybe weeks to fabricate them. It would take a ton of time and energy and then you could sell them for maybe a hundred bucks. It seems like the market isn't really there for it. So the idea that this is a 1800s fabrication seems unlikely to me. That seems strange. So given that, what do you think is the. You know, again, I know it's difficult to really speculate as to what happened or how, but this idea of some type of ancient machine that was able to create items like this, do you think that's a likely possibility? And you know, why does that theory exist and what exactly does that mean?
- [26:31]
B
If we are talking about machines, we can talk about hand guided machines or fully automated CNC machines. We can talk about a lot of different kind of machines. I see it unlikely that they had a fully automated CNC machine back then. But I think we are on the level or on the point where we are slightly changing this historical understanding of those people by measuring these artifacts. Because we have to say that they had some kind of lathe or spindle to work with, but they are not. These people are not attributed with these kind of tools.
- [27:13]
A
Now, a lathe, what exactly is a lathe?
- [27:16]
B
Lathe is like a machine which is holding onto the piece, it's turning it, and you come with a blade or with a different tool to carve or remove material while it's spinning.
- [27:31]
A
Mm.
- [27:32]
B
It can be horizontal, vertical, it doesn't matter. It just has to be have some kind of rigid bearing system and a rigid holding system, because these stones are very, very hard and also rigid and the material is inhomogeneous. So basically you have different kind of crystals in it, you have quartz, you have different kind of minerals and materials which makes it hard to carve, like a stainless steel or something. It's much different. And fun fact, when I send the order to print these, it was a Chinese company, I wanted to. They had a CNC machining service as well. Like just 3D printing. And I wanted to print out the OG ways and they were not able to carve out the interior of the OG ways. So basically the interior is also hollowed out in the same way as we could see it on the heat map. But they told me that they cannot do it because they don't have the right technology to do this. It was too complicated for. I think they had at least a 4 or 5 axis CNC machine. The interior is still complicated. And when you. That's fascinating when you think about it. I mean, yes, for a CNC machine it's complicated, but for a flint tool attached to a wood, it doesn't improbable.
- [29:11]
A
To say the least. I mean, the fact that you had a perfect scan. So this is an exact replica.
- [29:16]
B
Yes, exactly. Yeah.
- [29:17]
A
Interior, exterior, everything.
- [29:19]
B
The interior is reconstructed because the laser scanner cannot see inside the vase. The CT scanner is much better regarding this because it shoots X rays onto the object, but the laser scanner is not able to see through very tiny openings.
- [29:39]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. So when you send this to a Chinese company and say, hey, make this. Exactly, they say, we can't. We don't have the material, we don't have the technology.
- [29:48]
B
I didn't want them to make it out of granite. I ordered it from. Or of stainless steel, but it was still.
- [29:54]
A
And even stainless steel, which is much softer.
- [29:56]
B
Yes, much softer. Much easier to work with. We have the technology, we are working with that for hundreds of years. And Adam actually sent another order to a Chinese manufacturing company who makes granite objects. It was actually. You can see the vase here. This is the object he could order from a Chinese company. It's like a replica of an existing Egyptian vase, but made out of granite. You can see the CNC machine they were using here. Like one axis is turning the piece and another one comes from a different direction and it's carving out probably it's marble. It's not granite here. But they use modern machines. And the result was very interesting because they were not able to hollow out the interior. They drilled like a straight hole into this. But they said we cannot do this elliptical ovid interior. And the result, the median circularity of the exterior was like 4, 4,000ths of an inch, like 110 micron.
- [31:19]
A
110 microns?
- [31:20]
B
Yes.
- [31:20]
A
Whereas the OG vase is 16.
- [31:22]
B
16 micron.
- [31:24]
A
Wow. So even with the most premier advanced modern technology, they were still four times less precise.
- [31:32]
B
I'm not sure if they had the best tools they could have.
- [31:36]
A
Well, at least modern tools.
- [31:38]
B
Yes. But we can.
- [31:40]
A
They have better tools than they had in the, the pre, you know, dynastic Egyptian era.
- [31:46]
B
Definitely.
- [31:46]
A
And even then they were still four or five times off what that OG vase was.
- [31:51]
B
Yeah.
- [31:51]
A
What's up guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have a story to tell you. Fun fact, after you have a child, your testosterone naturally goes down. It's a way for you to like become like more empathetic and more in touch and like protect your kid and stuff. And I didn't really believe that. But then I had a baby like a year ago and I started to feel it around, like 3 o' clock would roll around and I would get more tired. I wasn't really sleeping that great because we just had a baby and I was like drinking more coffee and I started getting anxious and I was like, this is not working. I was like, should I just do trt? Like I know a lot of guys in the hit like 30, 40, they're just ripping TRT. So I was looking into it, I was like, ah, it affects your fertility. I might want to have some more kids. So I was like, all right, there must be a way I can do this that's more natural and just like support my testosterone. So I hit my buddy David who does the ads, and I was like, is there anyone that's out there doing any of this kind of stuff? And he was like, oh, you should check out Mars Men, Mars Men. Right here is a natural testosterone booster. This is going to just basically support your testosterone using a bunch of supplements and natural ingredients that are going to make your testosterone be what it's supposed to be. Okay, don't even think about TRT because again, it can be overkill. You're going to be injecting your body and it can also shut down your body's like natural production of testosterone, but using this stuff. Tongat, Ali, shilajit, vitamin D, zinc, boron, all the natural stuff that is going to be supporting your healthy T levels and helping your stamina and giving you more energy throughout the day. And honestly, it's great. I've only been trying it for a couple weeks now and I want to do a before and after testosterone test and see how much more my testosterone boosted. 91% of guys reported feeling higher energy. And the reviews on this are absolutely amazing. It's made in the USA, third party tested and there is a 90 day money back guarantee. So there's literally no risk. You can try it for, you know, three months and if it's not for you, they will get you your money back. And for a limited time, the listeners of this program, this is a crazy deal. By the way, most brands don't do this. You're going to get 60% off for life and three free gifts. When you use the code camp@ Mengotomars.com that is men M E N Gotomars M A R S.com and use the code camp at checkout and after you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please say that you heard about them from Camp Gagnon, that we sent you there. It really helps us out. Mars Men is great. It is a natural support for your testosterone. Look, you can buy all of these supplements separately or you can just go to Mars Men and get it all in one case. Now let's get back to the show. I mean, yeah, to me it's like this is all pointing to something strange. I don't know exactly what, I don't know why, but it just doesn't seem like a bunch of guys standing around with, you know, sticks, like maybe some artisan that's been doing this since he was seven years old and he just, you know, chips away at vases all day and that's all he does. And then he dies. And then he teaches his kids how to do it. Like I'm like maybe they could do it at scale and they could pump them out like one a week or something like that. And then you have like a bunch of them that are doing it. Just it seems unlikely to me. So I guess, you know, I'm trying to understand what are some potential stories of how these actually came to be. Not necessarily what your own personal beliefs are, what you think happened. Because again, you're not a stonemason, you're not necessarily an Egyptologist. But I guess what are some of the theories out there that exist as to how these came to be? You know, you have this lathe idea where you have something that's holding this and spinning and then you know, someone either manually, you know, handling a blade or some type of edge that's able to then carve these. Is that likely? But again, even that goes against what this story is about this time in history. That they didn't have lathes until much later.
- [35:31]
B
Yeah. So the team, VR team who is investigating these, it's called the Artifact foundation. And we have precision manufacturing experts in the team called Chris King. He has a well known brand in the States, actually, Chris King Precision Components. He's making hub sets and headsets for high End bikes. So he's in the precision manufacturing world for like 50 years. He knows this inside and out. And he has an idea that you can make this with wooden lathes. So basically you can, if you have the right black, African, black hardwood, and it's called journal bearing, where you have a shaft in housing with some lubricant, you can make something like this in, in hundreds, 100 micron or something. It's, it's achievable according to him, but not with the mainstream explanation. You have to add, have a very rigid and stable mechanism to, as I said, to hold onto these and to make it. So basically the bearing has to have the same, at least the same or even more higher tolerances than the end product.
- [36:51]
A
Oh, interesting. Because even to make a lathe that spins, any imperfections to the spinning apparatus will then transfer to the piece itself. Oh, that's interesting. So if you have a perfect piece of pottery, hypothetically you have a perfect lathe or a perfect pottery wheel. You can't have the perfect piece of pottery without the perfect wheel.
- [37:14]
B
You cannot do a precise object with a shitty lathe.
- [37:16]
A
Yeah, that's interesting. So that just brings in all, you know, so many more questions that, oh, this was obviously made with a lathe, but how the hell do they make a lathe that was so perfect?
- [37:27]
B
You can make very flat surfaces by lapping techniques or with lapping techniques, you can lap two pieces of flat stones and if you do it for enough time, it will be flat, very flat. It's a well known technique, it's used even modern times. I think you can also make rounded objects with different techniques. So making it obviously not easy, but not impossible. The question is why these people did it. And the later Egyptians, those vases, those alabaster vases they made, why they are not even close to these tolerances. That's a softer stone, easier to work with. But still they are not resembling the same technology like the older ones. And you can see it in Egypt, the older stuff is always a little bit better than the new stuff. It's made out of granite, it requires insane amount of work, insane amount of manpower and tools. And the new stuff is a little bit less complicated, let's say.
- [38:45]
A
Now what is the mainstream explanation for why that is? What is the generally accepted consensus for why things seem to technologically devolve a little bit over time? Is there one?
- [38:57]
B
I'm not sure exactly, but I think the basic explanation is that, yeah, kingdoms and the countries were collapsing and then they forget some kind of tech and Then they reinvented it. I had a nice conversation on my show with Luke Caverns and yeah, Luke is great. And he just told me that in the Roman period of. So the later dynasties in Egypt were Greeks. Sorry, not Romans, Greeks. And they figured out how to build monumental stuff out of granite again. So they built the watchtower in Alexandria and it was made out of granite. So they sometimes figure out how to do it again. But you don't see it to that same extent. To the same extent you saw it in the Old Kingdom or the pre dynastic Egypt.
- [39:54]
A
I mean, that seems like a reasonable explanation. It seems reasonable to me that you would have a culture that has access to technology and that for whatever reason that access to that technology gets interrupted. Whether it's through famine, warfare, plague, one person has the information, maybe a collection of five people, and then they all die under unfortunate circumstances. You know, they don't have great record keeping in order to like actually transfer this information back in that time. And so it's possible that things just go away.
- [40:24]
B
You need two generations to forget something.
- [40:27]
A
Right. Like I always think about it this way, like I don't know my great grandfather's name, you know?
- [40:33]
B
Yeah.
- [40:34]
A
Like this is the guy like that, like the reason I'm here, really. I know up to my grandfather. Then that's it. Like, do you know your great grandfather's name? Like how far back can you go? Great great grandfather.
- [40:47]
B
Something like that. We. I started this family tree a few years ago, I think five, six generations.
- [40:56]
A
Okay. So you go probably to like the. Maybe 1800s, 1700s.
- [41:01]
B
Yeah, something like that. But I don't know by heart actually, but I have it on paper.
- [41:06]
A
So it's one of those things where it's like even something that's personal in our everyday lives just is gone. And sure, you could maybe find it, but in that time, without extensive record keeping, the idea that the information gets lost seems pretty plausible. But the functionality and the utility of hard stone vases would seem to present itself regularly. And so people would find new ways or different ways to basically get the same result, but they won't be the exact same as they originally were.
- [41:33]
B
Yes.
- [41:34]
A
So to me, that is. That is very interesting. And again, kind of goes, I guess, against the mainstream narrative of what these people were and what they did. And I think there's sometimes a neat understanding of history that things slowly get more and more advanced and that everything is continuing to go up, whereas the reality is this might not be the case. Specifically in ancient Egypt, it seems like there is A de evolution and that there is technology that is lost in some capacity.
- [42:01]
B
The dynastic Egyptians were great. They were probably the best of their time. The astronomy, the mathematics, all these. So they built amazing stuff. But you can see that those, those objects like, like these or the very big rain statues, the multi hundred ton grain statues, they just, maybe they were not important that much anymore, or they started to evolve technologically on a different path and this was not important anymore. Or they inherited a lot of this stuff from the previous culture. That's also an option. We don't know. How old are these exactly? I was in the Grand Egyptian Museum a few months ago in Cairo and there I've seen a bowl like this with three different serial numbers on it. One from the current museum collection or archive, one from the previous, one from the before that. And sometimes they are dating these objects by the inscriptions on them. Because some of these has a very, very primitive inscriptions, like the pharaoh's name or something. I started to wonder, what if they did exactly the same we do now? They found those they wanted to claim as theirs, they put it on display, they put it in their graves. But they were not the original manufacturers of these objects.
- [43:33]
A
I mean again, that seems plausible to me. I mean that's. But that's the case throughout all of ancient Egypt. Right? Like there will be a new pharaoh that perhaps discovers or claims an existing monument. And then we'll just put his name directly over the first name that was there.
- [43:48]
B
Yeah, that's common. Ramses ii. Ramses the Great was well known by this. So his father was Seti I and he inscribed over his father's inscriptions.
- [44:02]
A
Right, so this is common.
- [44:04]
B
Yeah, that's why you can see those helicopter and spaceship glyphs in Seti's temple. Because Ramses came and he overwritten some new stuff on his father's inscriptions and it's flaked off in a way that it's now resembling this UFO stuff.
- [44:25]
A
It looks like something strange.
- [44:26]
B
Yeah. Yes.
- [44:27]
A
Yeah. That's interesting. If anyone hasn't seen it, I mean, you should look it up. We can probably drop it on the screen here while people are watching. But it's basically these old hieroglyphic inscriptions that look like helicopters or UFOs or planes and they look strange. But the theory that you're explaining is that because of this overlay that would happen where people basically put their names on top of existing names or on top of existing glyphs, they basically just changed the shape of them completely. You could imagine if you wrote, you Know, like your name and then someone wrote their name on top of your name. It would create a weird looking thing in the dead space, you know, and so basically trying to do like a tattoo cover up, you know, there's gonna be, there's gonna be some elements that are a little bit weird if you're not, you know, completely erasing everything. That makes a lot of sense. So to me I'm like, it would make complete sense that they would happen with, you know, these vases. If you see a name on it, it's like, well, it's not necessarily that guy's. Because throughout history people have been known to kind of take credit for things that they didn't necessarily create.
- [45:22]
B
Exactly.
- [45:23]
A
So that would make it difficult with the dating, you know, but it's at least as old as that. Likely older, you know, whatever the name is, it would be at least that old.
- [45:32]
B
At least that old, yeah.
- [45:33]
A
That's fascinating. So what is the mainstream pushback to this idea of having some type of lathe, like a hand cranked lathe, to actually create these for the people in that time?
- [45:44]
B
The laythe were attributed to those people thousands of years after these were first found or like Middle Kingdom, the idea.
- [45:53]
A
Of like a lathe?
- [45:54]
B
I think so I'm not sure. But I know that these were coming from the ages or the period before the official laith begins or starts to be appearing and the put. I think a lot of weird controversial videos went viral, like they were made by UFOs or very, I don't know, five Axis CNC machines. And the pushback started there. In my opinion that people were too.
- [46:35]
A
Grandiose in their claims.
- [46:36]
B
Yes, exactly. And I think the easiest explanation is that either we didn't find those tools yet or they were inherited from a different culture. But we don't know the connection yet. So probably it's like it's a big missing link in history in our understanding of those ancient people.
- [46:56]
A
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. This message may be shocking to many millennials. If you are one, you might want to sit down right now. Loads of people are searching the following on low rise jeans, halter top Velour, tracksuit, hookah shell, necklace, disc, belt. You likely place these in the dark of your closet in 2004, never to be seen again. But if you can find it in yourself to dust them off, there are a lot of people who will give you money for them. Sell on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Mmm. And there's also, I think, a fundamental mismatch that happens with scientific standards of evidence and what the American public will accept as likely or probable. So it seems like within the scientific standard, it's like we're not going to accept any type of theory without substantial evidence, without some type of like, you know, smoking gun that we are able to discover. We're not going to really change what is the overall story or what is the overall explanation. And so for us and for the audience listening, they're looking at these vases. They're like they're made of super, super strong stone. They're so almost perfectly circular. Their tolerances are just so phenomenal. And they're built before the lathe. And there's an obvious mismatch here. And so for the general public, I think they can look at this and be like, well, yeah, this was obviously made with some type of primitive machine or some type of hand cranked lathe with like some type of two axis situation where, you know, this is fixed here and then there's some type of fixed point above it and it's able to bore it out and they're able to angle it to then make it, you know, somehow perfectly circular. But without ever discovering those machines, the people that were using them, some type of inscription about how they did it, it's difficult for mainstream archaeology to actually get on board. And so as a result, now we have this mismatch between sort of like, you know, the institutional, sort of scientific sort of scrutinizing side that needs like this almost impossible standard of evidence. And then people like you that are doing independent research saying like, hey, this is obviously not made by hand and there's a fundamental disagreement that occurs between both parties. Yeah, and that's how it seems to me.
- [49:39]
B
And Egyptologists and archaeologists didn't look at these things like we do now. So no one analyzed these before us this way. So there are rumors that they are more precise than we think and they are special for a reason. And that's why Adam actually started to collect these and analyze these first. And then now we could get into museums and collect hard evidence. And we have been in London, in the Petrie Museum, in Turin, Italy, in the Boston MFA in the Brooklyn Museum. So we are. Museums are opening up as they see that we are trying to follow the scientific way in collecting these evidences. And just to compare, actually we also scan pottery vases and alabaster vases. So I can show you actually the difference between a few of these. If you're talking about the alabaster, this is, this piece here, it's coming from the same culture, same Nagada culture, 3000 or even more B.C. and obviously, as you can see by your naked eye, it's got some issues. Yeah, it got some issues. It's a nice piece. But the median circularity of this is two hundredths of an inch or three or seven hundred thirty microns.
- [51:07]
A
Seven hundred. So again, to put in comparison, the OG is sixteen microns.
- [51:12]
B
Sixteen microns.
- [51:13]
A
This is seven hundred, seven hundred.
- [51:16]
B
If we are looking at an alabaster race, which is. We also scanned. This is the type of vessel which is actually described to be made by Imhodep and Djoser with the traditional handcrafting method. And you can still see these today in Egypt. If you go to Egypt, you can see these being made on a street by craftsman. And the median of the, the bottom is a little bit wonky, but the, the, the base is quite good, or the rest of the body 500 microns. So it's a little bit better. We have also seen, by the way, we have also seen alabaster with 140 micron or something like that. So there are nice alabaster vases, but as I said, it's much easier to carve. It's a softer stone.
- [52:14]
A
You would think you would find many more alabaster vases with 15 microns, 20 microns because it's so much easier, but you don't.
- [52:22]
B
Yeah. And if you look at the best ways, we found in the Petri Museum, this little piece, 72. 72 microns. Yeah.
- [52:34]
A
I mean it's also worth noting just how thin these are. Like they're so remarkably thin.
- [52:40]
B
Not every of these are thin. If you look at the OG ways compared to its.
- [52:48]
A
Which one of these is the OG face?
- [52:50]
B
None of these. Sorry. These are only museum pieces scans. But I can show you the OG ways, actually. So if you look at the inside, this is a laser scan where we could capture some of the interior. But there is a nice CT scan where you can see the full interior. And this is the wall thickness.
- [53:14]
A
Wow.
- [53:15]
B
So not all of these are thin. There are some thin vases where if you shine a light inside the vase, it you can see the entire. It's transparent, almost transparent because of the crystal content, the type. And it's also, like, a few millimeters thick or even less than a millimeter. So it's also another question. How can you reach that level of thickness without breaking or fracturing the material?
- [53:42]
A
I mean, even under the best circumstances with a machine, that would be extremely difficult. When it gets so thin, it has.
- [53:48]
B
To be very stable and not shaking at all. So it's a complicated process.
- [53:55]
A
Wow.
- [53:56]
B
With this one, you can see this was scanned completely. I could scan the interior as well. The original. Shape and texture is this. This is made out of diorite. This is a very, extremely hard stone, and it's attributed to the sixth dynasty.
- [54:22]
A
So a little later.
- [54:23]
B
It's a little bit later. And the interesting part, or the interesting aspect of this, that the interior is more precise than the exterior. So the interior is around one thousandth of an inch.
- [54:35]
A
Oh, that's so funny.
- [54:37]
B
I have so many. So many results here.
- [54:41]
A
I mean, the fact that the interior would be more precise next year is just hilarious. I mean, there's no reason that that wouldn't be the. There was no reason why they would make it that way intentionally.
- [54:51]
B
Maybe it was easy for them. Maybe their tools allowed this easily and they didn't have to think about it.
- [54:56]
A
Right.
- [54:57]
B
So the exterior is 140microns, or 5,000ths of an inch, and the exterior, or the interior is one thousandth of an inch. 26 microns.
- [55:11]
A
Wow. 260 microns.
- [55:13]
B
No, 20.
- [55:14]
A
26 is the interior interior. Wow. I mean, that's almost as good as, like, the. Like the petri vase here.
- [55:21]
B
Like, that's also from the Petri Museum. So this way, externally was the best, had the most or the highest tolerance, 70. But the interior of this one is a little bit better.
- [55:32]
A
Wow.
- [55:33]
B
It's half.
- [55:34]
A
I mean, that is remarkable. I mean, yeah. Like, I. It's so interesting that people collected these and they thought they were so interesting without even knowing how interesting they really were. You know, like, they were looking at them being like, wow, these are really precise. They look really cool. And they didn't even realize that they were, you know, in some cases, you know, 16. What is the unit? 16 microns. 16 microns that there were 16 microns of. Like, the tolerance was just phenomenal. I mean, that's so crazy. So I'm curious what happens now. Like, I think you've made a pretty compelling case that these were unlikely to be made by hand. You know, that some guy was some artisan, perhaps a skilled artisan 5,000 years ago was sitting there and, like, carving these out so perfectly that, you know, even today, modern technology would have a hard time with it. So perfectly that if you shined a light through it, some of the light would emanate out because it was so thin, so perfect that to make one of them, it might take years. And somehow there's tens of thousands of them. The levels of perfection that we're talking about here are just so remarkable that I have a hard time believing that they were made by hand. One of the things that I struggle with, though, is the variance between them. It seems like no two vases are really the same.
- [56:57]
B
Not really. You can see similar ones. You can see vases with a very similar design, but we didn't find two identical pieces yet. So the mass production theory is not working, in my opinion. Even the mold, like, if they were cast. I mean. Yes. If you can cast it, then where is the mold and why there is no two identical pieces?
- [57:28]
A
I mean, are you also. Are you able to cast stone like this?
- [57:31]
B
You can cast stone. I'm not sure if you can cast this until. Or to reach this kind of tolerance or this level of tolerance.
- [57:41]
A
Because you still have to make a perfect mold.
- [57:42]
B
Yes.
- [57:44]
A
Which. I mean, it would be easier to make one perfect mold than, you know, making tens of thousands.
- [57:48]
B
And the other thing is, if you are using a lathe, you still have to do the handles somehow. So you cannot do the handles on a lathe. You have to come with a different device and remove the stuff from bit. If you leave like a bullnose, and then you come later and remove that parts between the handles, the lock handles, that would leave some mark.
- [58:12]
A
So the handles are also a part of the same stone.
- [58:16]
B
Yes.
- [58:17]
A
It's not a separate piece?
- [58:18]
B
No. It's not glued on it? No. It's part of the same stone. And it's. It's problematic if you think about the lathe technology, because how would you do this?
- [58:31]
A
That is interesting.
- [58:32]
B
That's a different question. And if you look at the OG rays between the handles, you can see a lot of green spots, which means that there is no significant deviation or tolerance changing between the handles. Today, if you want to remove this material between. From between the handles, you have to come with a different tool. It will introduce an error because you have to reposition the piece. You have to basically, or you will introduce kind of another tool mark, another deviation in this position or in this area. But you don't see it. The og.
- [59:17]
A
I mean, it's Interesting though, with the OG vase, there actually is a line, it seems like at the top, like that blue line, which would lead one to think like, oh, I wonder if that is like the band of stone that existed that then they carved away.
- [59:31]
B
But they carved it away with extreme precision. So it's like you can see this part, it's almost as good as the lower sections.
- [59:39]
A
Well, they certainly carved it away, right. If it's all the same piece of stone, you have these handles at the top, it was carved away. How they did it again, this is the question.
- [59:48]
B
No idea. I think no one knows how these are exactly made.
- [59:51]
A
Right. But the fact that there's no two that are similar raises some questions for me. As far as this lathe idea or some type of multiaxis machine that with a multi axis machine, I would assume that there would be very many that are of at least the same size or of the same tolerances. But that doesn't seem to be the case. So I'm curious, what do you make of that?
- [60:12]
B
If it's computer guided and if there is a program you start, you can assume that there are two identical or there will be two identical pieces. Like 3D printing, it's easy, you don't have to guide it manually. Again to have the same sizes and everything. But if you have a lathe and you do it, the hand guiding manually, you design the vases, somehow that's a different topic, the design, the elliptical design of these. But if you guide it, if you guide a tool manually by your hands, then you will achieve very similar but still different pieces. So you can still have this sophisticated lathe or machine. But the key point here is the hand guided tool.
- [61:01]
A
So it's possible that there was a hand guided element?
- [61:05]
B
Yeah, I think so. That would be likely even polishing or just the carving itself.
- [61:11]
A
Yeah, interesting. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah. I wonder how much could be achieved through polishing. Like if you were to generally carve this out with hand and you get it generally kind of looking the same and then you just polish the shit out of it.
- [61:24]
B
First, this ways this replica which we ordered from China out of granite, it was polished by power or with power tools by hand and it reached this 100 micron.
- [61:39]
A
Hmm. I wonder if they polished it for longer. They polished it for another like, I don't know, 30 days.
- [61:47]
B
But if you polish it by hand, somehow you have to know how much more you should polish this in this part and that part to be perfectly, perfectly even. Round. Yeah.
- [61:58]
A
Interesting.
- [62:00]
B
Hmm.
- [62:01]
A
What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you know what time it is. It's time to level up. And bluechew just dropped something wild. Okay? Bluechew's been rocking with us from the beginning, so of course we have to rock. Pun intended. With them. All right? And what they've just done is changing the game. All right? This is next level gold metal energy. This is bluechew gold. If you never heard of it, this is the newest innovation from the number one chewable ed brand. All right? This isn't the little blue pill that your grandpa used. This is the four in one beast that is setting the gold standard for performance. We're talking two ingredients to keep the good times rolling, okay? Mixed with apomorphine and oxytocin that are going to turn up the arousal and the connections in your brain, as well as the ingredients to keep the blood flow to keep everything pumping. Okay? Blue chew gold dissolves into your tongue and works in as little as 15 minutes. And that means you're going to be rocking quicker and staying in the game longer. Let me just say. That's how we put this tent up every single episode. We give Christos a blue chew. And you know What? We have this 10 rocking all year round, okay? That's what it takes. Now, I recommend this in a, you know, a married, Christian relationship, but you know what? You guys can do whatever you want. Bluechew is the ultimate service to get you these chewables to your door in a discreet way to keep the bedroom on fire. We have a special deal for the listeners of this program. You're going to get 10% off your first month of blue chew gold if you use the code gagnon G A G N o n. That's promo code Gagnon G a G N o n. You can visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And thank you so much to bluechew for keeping the lights on and making this show possible. Now let's get back to it. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I gotta tell you a story. Imagine you're sitting in your house. It's cold outside. It's. It's a little snowy. And you're like, man, I just want a panini. So you go and you order it, you know, from doordash or something like that. And it never gets to you. You're looking at the app, you're like, dude, it's been four hours. Where's my panini? You're calling no One answers. Well, this is a true story that happened. There was a woman, a client that was working as a doordash driver and she slipped and fell on an icy walkway outside of a Panera Bread in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She breaks her elbow, which leads to surgery and hardware having to get inserted into her arm. She can't work. And originally, you know, she sues Panera. And Panera's like, okay, we'll give you like 125,000. But then the good people over at Morgan and Morgan fought for her and got her the million dollar verdict that she deserved. Yes. If you never heard of them, Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. Yes. And they're that way for a reason. They've been fighting for the people for over 35 years. Now, I'll be honest. If I ordered, you know, a panini and the woman gets paid a million bucks because she slipped, I mean, it's a tragic thing to happen, of course, but I deserve a little bit of that. I, I should get a cut at least, right? I'm the one to order the panini. If I never ordered that panini, she never would have slipped, never got a million bucks, which obviously she deserves. You know what I mean? But maybe next time she gets a million and million point one, I can get a cool a hundred thousand out of that. Regardless. All I'm saying is if you're ever injured and you are looking to get the money that you deserved, the compensation that is entitled to from your injuries, Morgan and Morgan could be the way to go. Hiring the wrong law firm can be disastrous. I mean, you can be locked up and litigate. It's a nightmare. But hiring the right law firm could substantially increase your settlement. And with Morgan and Morgan, it's easy to get started. Their fee is $0 unless they win. That's right. Their fee is free. Unless they win your case, you don't pay a zero, you pay zero cents. Unless they win your case, you can visit forthepeople.com gagnon g a g n o n that is f o r the people.com gagnon or dial pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. That's for the people.com gagnon or click the link in the description below. And thank you so much to the good F over at Morgan and Morgan for sponsoring this program and making this show possible with this paid advertisement. Let's get back to the show. Yeah, I mean, it raises questions again. I'm like trying to narrow down on exactly how it was done and why it was done in this way. And you said that some of them, obviously, the ones we have in front of us, are these exact replicas of quite small vases. But there are some that are five times the size. There are some that are massive.
- [66:16]
B
I can find that video. It's in the British Museum, actually, and it's huge. Imagine the original size of these or the row size of the actual material. This is the method from the later dynasties. That's the explanation how they carve those. They put these wooden stuff inside with a kind of flint or some kind of blade attached to the end of it. And then they had some weights on the. On the higher end and they could basically rotate it by hand. This is working for alabaster. But if you think about these pieces down, these are heavy, heavy pieces, like this size, at least.
- [67:10]
A
Wow.
- [67:11]
B
And obviously the original, the raw material, was much bigger. They had to carve away this excess material. And the inhomogeneous nature of this stone, just obvious. These different minerals has different hardness.
- [67:32]
A
I mean, that's remarkable. So the black part and the white part has different levels of hardness.
- [67:36]
B
Yeah, exactly. So it's a different. It's a new variable in the game, I'd say.
- [67:46]
A
Now, is it possible that they were done by hand, just like how that hieroglyph kind of depicted? Right. You have just a piece of flint or some type of other stone that's in there that you're carving out? And just by chance, the OG vase was virtually perfect and that one was perfect. And some of these other ones have different deviations, but every now and again, they made one that was just almost perfect, just through trial and error. And maybe they were able to make them quicker than we thought. Is it possible that that is the case?
- [68:13]
B
We see badly made hearthstone vases as well, so we see those with very low tolerance. So, like, the same level as the pottery, or you can see it clearly with your eyes that it's not good, not good at all. But was it a different craftsman? Was it a different workshop? Was it an apprentice who started to learn how to make these? I don't know.
- [68:40]
A
It's possible.
- [68:40]
B
But you can see perfect, imperfect vases. Yeah, interesting.
- [68:45]
A
And the fact that there are some that are perfect, some that are imperfect. To me, the other question is something you already touched on before is, like, why do you need a vase to be perfect? You know, like, why does it need to be perfect, perfect? Like, if you could achieve this with pottery, why not just do pottery?
- [69:03]
B
Either it has a function so the tolerance or the level of perfectness has a function, even if it's a sacred function. If they were, I think Luke Caverns had this idea that probably if they were holding some sacred psychedelics or like random sacred liquids, they wanted the containers to be perfect to resemble the godness or something like that.
- [69:31]
A
Right.
- [69:33]
B
Or they had the tools which allowed them to make these easily and it wasn't that difficult.
- [69:39]
A
Or maybe both. It could be both. Could be both.
- [69:42]
B
Yeah.
- [69:42]
A
That's interesting. Yeah. I just. I don't know. I don't see why you would need something like, so little to be so perfect. I just don't get why that would be the case. It must be some type of, like, spiritual or like a religious thing, because functionally, like, this doesn't need to be that perfect. And I presume even with machinery, like, making this perfect would just be annoying. But yet here it is.
- [70:02]
B
But we are trying to launch a challenge. So we are at the Artifact Foundation. We are trying to challenge craftsmen and artisans to make these or one of these with the traditional methods. No cheating, no modern tools. Document it. And if you can reach the tolerance of these, we are giving away a $25,000 prize.
- [70:28]
A
Wow.
- [70:29]
B
So it's. It's a. It's not an easy task. And sometimes when you are trying to get it from a modern manufacturing company, you don't get that comparison. So you cannot compare that modern granite ways I showed you to these. And if you want to know what's achievable by hand, it's really hard to. To know what's the limit. I think the best way to do it with a challenge, I think that's great. So every detail will be available on the artifactfoundation.org website.
- [71:04]
A
Oh, that's awesome. And are you trying to approach specific types of students or specific types of people directly to work on this?
- [71:11]
B
Stone masons. Craftsmans. Yeah. Who has experience working in hearthstone igneous rock, like granite.
- [71:18]
A
Is there a time limit on this or is this, like, just open?
- [71:21]
B
I think it will be open until it's claimed. Yeah. Because the time, I mean, you cannot really estimate how much time do you need for this. And we would be happy to see someone trying everything he can, like a very skilled stonemason with the right tools, not modern, but traditional tools. And seeing the results. Can it reach the same level like this or the same level these vases have? Or it's possible or not? Let's figure it out now.
- [72:01]
A
What does the future of this field look like? Like, let's Say, you know, more time goes on, you're able to analyze more vases, you're able to see that the tolerances of these vases are just too perfect. And I think you've already done that. But let's say you continue to do that. What will it take for mainstream archaeology and mainstream history to change their narrative on what the pre dynastic Egyptians were able to accomplish?
- [72:27]
B
I think they need data, they need wetted research. Like, I think we have to involve Egyptologists and archaeologists. And we are actually working on this with the Egyptians in Cairo and they are seemingly open to this. So the younger generation of archaeologists and Egyptologists are getting more open to these ideas and to work together. I think the main problem here was that they didn't apply modern tools to these because no one thought that these are exceptional or no one thought in the academic field. And I think these still today considered as controversial theories and voodoo or I have no idea. But they are not researched enough. And that's what we are trying to do. And we are not only researching the vases, we have been in Egypt, we had an expedition last year and we have measured a few boxes, granite boxes, and that's also very extreme.
- [73:45]
A
Could you touch on the boxes really quick? This is really, really interesting.
- [73:49]
B
Yeah, I can do that. So basically we have a pyramid in a Fayum oasis. It's a little bit, let's say, not in good shape.
- [73:58]
A
The better days through a fixer upper.
- [74:01]
B
So the outer layer is mud brick and it's collapsing, you cannot go inside.
- [74:09]
A
But when was this discovered, this pyramid?
- [74:12]
B
I'm not sure. I'm not sure when. I think it was Old Kingdom also, or Middle Kingdom. It's a pyramid of Senusret. But I'm not sure about the actual age of this. What's more interesting, that's, that's the box inside. So these tunnels are not connected to the pyramid. There's a tunnel system underneath this structure.
- [74:36]
A
So you can see at the top, like that rock part, that's the pyramid.
- [74:39]
B
That's the pyramid. And that is you can go underneath.
- [74:41]
A
And inside the pyramid, there's an internal structure that you could have gone into back in the day, but it's closed off now.
- [74:46]
B
I think so. Yeah, yeah.
- [74:47]
A
And then below it there is a completely unrelated tunnel structure. That's pretty complicated.
- [74:53]
B
Yes. I have been only in the tunnel structure and it's actually quite remarkable. So this is the pyramid here, up there. And you can go down. It's his Adam actually here you can go down with a special permission. It's not available to the public. And yeah, there are a lot of stairs. It's a very long, long descent. Descent. A lot of bats all over the place. There was a room with full of bats in the corner. His Ben, actually. Oh, nice. Yeah. And we tried to do nice photogrammetry and scanning on these. I will show you this one artifact which is down here. There are some pits and shops filled with water on the bottom.
- [75:50]
A
For what? What is that even for?
- [75:53]
B
I don't know. I'm not very knowledgeable regarding this structure itself, the history of it. I was there to investigate that.
- [76:01]
A
The box.
- [76:04]
B
So, yeah, bats everywhere. Bats everywhere.
- [76:07]
A
And then you come into this room.
- [76:09]
B
When we were there, actually, one huge piece of rock just fell.
- [76:12]
A
No way.
- [76:12]
B
Yeah. So it's probably a little sketchy. It's collapsing. It's sketchy. That's why it's not open to the public. It's not really safe anymore, I would say.
- [76:20]
A
But it is beautiful. I mean, even in its current state, you can kind of see, like there was real intentionality and craftsmanship that went into creating these walls.
- [76:27]
B
And there's a big granite room inside. So I will come to this point soon. It's a small bed again. There's an arched ceiling made out of granite. And inside. Come on. It's a long video. Sorry. So this is a huge granite room, and everything you see here is granite. And there is a very precise box in the middle of this room. And Sir William Flinders Petrie investigated this box. He measured it and he said probably this is the most precise object, granite object ever came out of Egypt.
- [77:10]
A
Yeah.
- [77:11]
B
He measured the flatness of these, like, the top rim and several parts of it. And the other side, like, not the left top, but the right top on there, he measured 4,000ths of an inch flatness.
- [77:29]
A
Wow.
- [77:30]
B
And it's made out of one single piece of granite.
- [77:33]
A
I mean, it's just remarkable.
- [77:35]
B
And if you see the edges, it's like, crazy. And it's not fitting through this door.
- [77:44]
A
Right. So either it was built inside the room or the room was built around it.
- [77:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. And we tried to, like, prove Flinders Petrie's measurements on this box, and we could actually measure the same. He measured.
- [78:04]
A
You actually took scanning technology into it?
- [78:06]
B
Yes, and also photogrammetry and this stuff. So we have reconstructed this box in 3D, and we could fit perfect planes on these parts. And you can see that the range is in inches and the green is around plus minus 4,000ths of an inch, which is roughly 100 micron. And most of this part is 100 micron.
- [78:34]
A
Wow.
- [78:37]
B
We could measure also the bottom and other pieces, like other corners, other walls of it. And both came out around the same 4,000ths of an inch, which is extreme.
- [78:57]
A
I mean, it's perfect. When this was discovered, was this used as a tomb for a sarcophagus? Was there ever a top that was.
- [79:05]
B
Yeah, the mainstream explanation is used as a sarcophagus.
- [79:09]
A
I see. But nothing was ever found in the modern era. It was likely looted beforehand or something to that effect. Is that what the story is?
- [79:16]
B
I'm not sure about this particular pyramid. I don't want to say wrong things or lies, so I don't know.
- [79:25]
A
That's fair. Okay.
- [79:26]
B
I don't know.
- [79:27]
A
Is that Googleable? I wonder if we.
- [79:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. It's a pyramid of Senusret of Cenusret.
- [79:31]
A
Would you mind googling that, Gabe? The pyramid of Cenusret and just see if there was ever a Lahun L.
- [79:40]
B
A h U n. Okay.
- [79:42]
A
Lahun. And just see if there was ever a mummy that was found inside or a pharaoh or a body sarcophagus, et cetera. But that is just fascinating. I mean, even like the squaring on the angles here are like almost perfectly 90.
- [79:56]
B
It's crazy. It's crazy. If you. I have another shot from the other side. So if we are coming. This is behind this granite room. They are trying to keep it up. It's collapsing slowly. But if you go towards this room from this direction, you can see the masonry. This arched ceiling is also granite and.
- [80:28]
A
The arches are perfect.
- [80:30]
B
We didn't measure that, but it looks quite nice to me, actually.
- [80:33]
A
It looked remarkable. I mean, it looks so modern, I guess is my feeling. It just looks like that could exist in a villa today.
- [80:42]
B
And I want to show you the flatness and reflection on the box. I will come to this point soon.
- [80:47]
A
And you can see where it changes where you have, I guess, more traditional limestone or some type of more common rock in the region to then perfect.
- [80:55]
B
Probably this mortar is modern. Some kind of fix or. I don't know. But he's Kyle. Kyle Allen from the Brothers of the Serpent podcast is also part of this investigation. Are you familiar with them?
- [81:10]
A
Yeah, they're great.
- [81:12]
B
So you can see the. This. It's not the best shot, but no, you can see. Did you see the reflection of this maybe when I came in. Do you see that? It's not perfectly smooth. You can see some. Yeah, there's little aberrations like mineral dents or something in the stone. But it's I think, the right term for. It's perfectly grinded. No, it's not grinded. Sorry for my English. I have no idea. But it's perfectly flat but not smooth, so it has deviations and dents in the material itself.
- [81:56]
A
But that's possible from. I mean, granite is like an amalgam of many different types of stone. So it's possible that some of the pieces of stone or crystallization within the granite erodes with time or that there's some type of reason why that goes away, or it's harder to actually grind down or to smooth out. And so it creates these little aberrations. But this is, I feel like, pretty common with any type of piece of unrefined granite.
- [82:23]
B
Like, it's an inhomogeneous material.
- [82:25]
A
Right. Like, if you had, like, a modern granite countertop, like, prior to being, you know, perfected, I guess you're gonna see, like, little aberrations in it, even with granite to this day. So to me, that doesn't seem that. That crazy. The fact that it's all so flat is remarkable. And the bottom of it isn't. That's the most interesting part. So if. If anyone listening at home can imagine, you have basically what looks like a shoebox. Okay. And there's like a large lip on the. It's just a perfect rectangle. And the top of it is completely level. Like, you could just put a ball right on top and it wouldn't roll anywhere. But the bottom part is cut at this strange angle.
- [83:07]
B
Yes.
- [83:08]
A
So it's the. It's actually imperfect or perfectly imperfect. It's somehow created in a way that the bottom part is cut at this angle.
- [83:17]
B
So it's a perfect angle. So the angle is made with a precision as well.
- [83:21]
A
Right. It's intentionally made that way, but for whatever reason, it's at an angle. So it almost looks off kilter by like an inch or two. But then the top is still perfectly flat.
- [83:30]
B
Yeah.
- [83:31]
A
Bizarre. Truly strange. And that is just the actual, you know, box itself, not to mention the rest of the room, is also what looks like virtually perfect granite.
- [83:42]
B
And if I'm not mistaken, today we don't really make, like, kitchen countertops with this tolerance, like 4,000ths of an inch.
- [83:51]
A
Right.
- [83:52]
B
It has no function.
- [83:54]
A
Now, the burial story, again, this is an obvious trope that exists within Egyptology that when people don't know things, they just say, oh, it was a burial ceremony or whatever. The burial story, to me, does actually make sense here. Right. Like, you have a box type thing with no Drainage system. No reason to put things in or out. You know, it's beautiful. About the size of a human body inside a pyramid. I'm like, or at least underneath a pyramid. To me, I'm like, I could conceive of something being, you know, someone being buried here. To me, that's not crazy where that person is. What happened to the rest of the things that were in the room? I would like to know. But to me that seems like a reasonable explanation. And the fact that the tolerances are so perfect for a burial ceremony also makes sense, right? Like you don't need these countertops to be perfect. You don't need the countertops in your home to be perfect. You don't really need this to be perfect. Unless you had some type of spiritual or higher calling to make them perfect for some type of presentation in the afterlife.
- [84:58]
B
Or the entire structure has a different function which we cannot understand. Now maybe if it's a part of some kind of system which requires these tolerances, like a manufacturing system or something, then it also could be an explanation. But still, I mean, we can speculate, but I don't think we will exactly know what this was used for.
- [85:20]
A
That's possible. And not to mention if they have technology or machines that are different than what we think that they have, maybe making this is actually not as difficult as we think it is.
- [85:31]
B
Yeah, interesting.
- [85:33]
A
So now for something like this, what kind of a machine would could be used hypothetically to make something like this?
- [85:40]
B
You can lap these surfaces. So you can make almost perfectly flat surface with like rubbing two stones or flat stones on each other or three. There are different types of flapping techniques, but my. So the most interesting part of this is the angle. Like this, almost 90 degrees, perfect angles. And it's very, it's not sharp, it has some kind of flattened edge, but it's still, you can see that this flattened edge is also very straight. The mainstream explanation is the same kind of tools. If you use dolerite pounders and flint tools, theoretically, according to archaeologists, you can make this. I don't see that happening here. So I don't know. I think that's the right answer. I'm not a machinist, I don't know. But this also requires a very sophisticated tool, in my opinion, to guide it. Even if it's a hand guided power tool to some sort, it has to be sophisticated.
- [86:58]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's just remarkable. Like the level of precision that these specific pieces of technology or these specific artifacts possess and the fact that it doesn't Raise more question with mainstream traditional archaeologists. I find interesting. I wonder if I would love to ask just like straight down the middle Egyptologist or archaeologist and be like, what do you think of this? And I wonder what they would say. Have you asked them?
- [87:22]
B
Well, when we are in a museum set up and then we are scanning those things, usually one archaeologist is with us and she's watching, usually making sure that we are not breaking anything. And in the meantime, for example, Chris King is trying to explain what are the implications, why are we investigating this? And seemingly they didn't even think about that, that these things could be that precise. But they are open to the idea. Actually, I think we need to show hard evidence, hard proof and data and then we can have a constructive discussion. That's why I think the challenge is a very nice opportunity to show that, okay, today if we challenge every skilled stonemason, let's say we cannot achieve this or we can achieve this but with different tools, then we can start a question or start this discussion with archaeologists. Okay. Something is off with these explanations. It's not able to explain the precision.
- [88:36]
A
Right.
- [88:37]
B
And most of them are open, I think at least to the discussion. But in academia you have to show the proof, the data to have like a standpoint.
- [88:48]
A
Just remarkable. Well, Caraway, thank you so much, brother. I really hope you get many people signing up for this competition because I think the competition will lead, will yield interesting results for you guys. Not only to raise awareness and kind of spread this, you know, same sort of passion obsession with these specific artifacts, but additionally to see different ways that these things could have been made and maybe people can find, you know, clever or interesting ways to actually make these things that no one had ever thought of before. I think that would be really cool. And if nothing else, it just adds more experts into the industry. So whether you have a, you know, a machinist that tries to make it or you have a, you know, a craftsman that makes stone, you know, pieces of pottery, like they might have a contribution and then you can actually just collect interesting people and then who knows, maybe someone wins.
- [89:37]
B
Yes. So if anyone is interested in a more detailed in depth documentaries and videos about these results and what we are doing at the artifact foundation, they can find the related podcasts at just search for Ancient technology podcast or my name on YouTube or Spotify or Apple podcasts, it's K A R O L Y Poker. And yeah, they can find all of these material there.
- [90:02]
A
Amazing. Well, Caraway, thank you so much, brother. I really appreciate it and I'm going to keep an eye out for what happens with this competition. And hopefully we get to a point where there's a certain standard of evidence that mainstream archaeology and history will start to look at this and be like, all right, maybe our understanding of the timelines of technology are different than we originally thought, but who knows?
- [90:24]
B
Thank you for the opportunity, of course.
- [90:28]
A
And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural natural ally, Doug.
- [90:44]
B
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [90:47]
A
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- [91:26]
B
Great.
- [91:26]
A
Thank you, brother.