The Cosmic Game ( PDFDrive.com )

Cosmic Game © Douglass A. White, 2012 v151207 110
error! (With a base area so tiny - less than .15 square inches - any asymmetry in a
material as dense as granite would produce a lean in the balance of the finished piece.)
This kind of skill will raise the eyebrows of any machinist. To produce such a piece in
clay would be very impressive. In granite it is incredible.”
(Photos and text quoted from "Official Thread of the Unexplained":
http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=4734742&fpart=4)
The key to how the stone vessels were made is that they were "cooked" as a slurry of
small fragments in a mixture of geopolymer ingredients such as kaolin, natron, and lime
at a temperature of about 2000 degrees and then allowed to cool and set. While the
mixture had not fully hardened, it was molded on a potter's wheel to achieve the perfect
roundness and balance. Once hardened it appeared to be a piece of natural granite or
diabase. Even in predynastic times the Egyptians could create imitation gems with glass
paste and had unsurpassed craftsmanship in the working of flint. By the first dynasty
they had mastered techniques of drilling rock crystal with sand abrasives to fashion vases
and other delicate shapes as evidenced by examples found at Saqqara.
Evidence of ancient Egyptians rapidly sawing, and drilling hard rocks such as granite as
if it were a soft substance suggest that the Egyptians may have worked synthetic stone
with their flint and copper tools before it fully hardened. The Egyptians also could
carve and inscribe such stones in the same way. We know the Egyptians used rammed
earth construction. The Egyptians could use special ramming techniques applied to
synthetic rock as it cooled and set to produce stonework harder than the natural rocks in
the quarries from which they obtained the raw materials -- again suggesting that they may
have been manufacturing much if not most of the stone they used for construction and
decoration with geopolymer techniques.
The Old Kingdom pavement slabs at Giza are made of basalt. The quarry origin for this
material was in the nearby Fayum at Gebel el-Qatrani, where there is an extensive basalt
outcropping that was quarried extensively for use at Giza. However, it turns out that the
basalt there has fractures that disallow large blocks. Furthermore, there are no tool
marks at the quarry and the quarrying activity appears to be in the form of gathering
highly weathered debris rather than cutting blocks. There is a seven-mile paved road --
one of the earliest paved roads in the world -- from the quarry, but no evidence on it of
dragging large blocks. There are occasional piles of basalt debris that seem to be from
spilled loads. All of this suggests that the Egyptians did not quarry basalt blocks but
gathered basalt debris and transported it in baskets on donkeys and then used it to create
geopolymerized slabs on site at Giza. The slabs at Giza have been identified as sourced
from Gebel el-Qatrani, but their texture is coarser than that of the basalt there and really
is a form of coarser grained diabase. Davidovitz and Morris take that as indicating the
material came from Gebel el-Qatrani, but was then cold-geopolymerized into slabs rather
than applying heat, with the result that the slabs have the texture of diabase, a type of
rock that does not occur at all in the Fayum area. According to Morris, Davidovitz has
been able to replicate the synthesis of both the coarse-grained diabase and the finer
grained basalt by using, respectively, cold and hot geopolymerization processes. The