It is only 1.5 grams, but it has now been one of the most disruptive artifacts of early engineering to be extracted out of a museum drawer. It is a piece of copper alloy, bound up in a bit of leather, not the kind of articles which are in the same competition as monolithic stonework. Uncovered in the 1920s in Badari, Upper Egypt and put in the burial place of an adult man named Grave 3932, it was initially dismissed with one of those lines of catalog text: “a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it.” That name, so unembellished as it was, practically determined the destiny of the implement during a hundred years.
Recent researched work altered the narrative whereby the piece is not a point of puncture as a machine element. At magnification scale, wear documented by researchers has been seen to be associated with repeated spinning as opposed to mere stabbing: fine striations, rounded edges, and a slight curvature of the working tip. The importance of those marks lies in the fact that they maintain motion. Many organic components disappear during the lifetime of the early toolkits and the archaeologists are left with the tips of the metals and educated guesses. In this case, too, the metal has its own “history of use,” and the leather which remains gives a second rare hint: half a dozen turns of fine thong still wound around the shaft. The traces taken together propose a bow drill, a machine of which the bit is rapidly rotated by the action of a cord pushed to and fro by a bow. The outcome is an increase in speed and control, the distinction between pushing a point through material and cutting a clean hole that can be repeated.
It is that difference that goes beyond workshop trivia. This tool is dated to the Predynastic period prior to the first pharaohs, i.e. mechanical rotary drilling played out much earlier than the most familiar visual evidence on the later tomb art. It is described as the first known rotary metal drill in Egypt, which was found approximately 5,300 years ago. Practically, the discovery pushes the date of the bow-drill technology by approximately two millennia, and the depictions of drilling in artworks of the New Kingdom become the final episode of a much longer history of practice and not the prologue.
The ancient Egyptians are known to have built stone temples, painted tombs and gleaming jewelry, yet, behind the accomplishments, there were practical, everyday technologies, which seldom remain in the archaeological record, Martin Odler said. One of the most significant was the drill: A piece of equipment with the help of which wood, stone, and beads can be pierced, and furniture can be made, or the ornament can be created.
The composition of the metal used in the drill is yet another important aspect to the meaning of the drill. Based on portable X-ray fluorescence, the researchers discovered an alloy that is not plain copper. “The drill contained arsenic and nickel, significant traces of lead and silver,” Kmosek, Jiri, said. Such recipe would have resulted in a harder metal that is distinctly different to the eye than normal copper. Silver and lead could indicate the intention to make alloys and, perhaps, broader material and/or expertise networks between Egypt and the rest of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean of the fourth millennium B.C.E. A stiffer alloy would have lasted longer, particularly in cutting into heavy metals like dense wood, stone, or bead material areas where soft bit rapidly blunts and fails.
The re-analysis has given solid grounds that this object was used in a bow drill-which would have given an easier and more controlled drilling motion when compared to merely pushing or twisting the awl-like tool by hand, Odler said. This indicates that the Egyptian artisans had perfected consistent rotary drilling over 2000 years prior to the most durable drill sets.
Ultimately, the strength of the tool is its diminutiveness. It demonstrates how engineering history is frequently concealed in the unnoticed parts where some scratches, a turn of leather, a surprising alloy would demonstrate not only what people had created, but the mechanical reasoning that had created it.
