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Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs
A unique study of the engineering and tools used to create Egyptian monuments
• Presents a stone-by-stone analysis of key Egyptian monuments, including the statues of Ramses II and the tunnels of the Serapeum
• Reveals that highly refined tools and mega-machines were used in ancient Egypt
From the pyramids in the north to the temples in the south, ancient artisans left their marks all over Egypt, unique marks that reveal craftsmanship we would be hard pressed to duplicate today. Drawing together the results of more than 30 years of research and nine field study journeys to Egypt, Christopher Dunn presents a stunning stone-by-stone analysis of key Egyptian monuments, including the statue of Ramses II at Luxor and the fallen crowns that lay at its feet. His modern-day engineering expertise provides a unique view into the sophisticated technology used to create these famous monuments in prehistoric times.
Using modern digital photography, computer-aided design software, and metrology instruments, Dunn exposes the extreme precision of these monuments and the type of advanced manufacturing expertise necessary to produce them. His computer analysis of the statues of Ramses II reveals that the left and right sides of the faces are precise mirror images of each other, and his examination of the mysterious underground tunnels of the Serapeum illuminates the finest examples of precision engineering on the planet. Providing never-before-seen evidence in the form of more than 280 photographs, Dunn’s research shows that while absent from the archaeological record, highly refined tools, techniques, and even mega-machines must have been used in ancient Egypt.
• Presents a stone-by-stone analysis of key Egyptian monuments, including the statues of Ramses II and the tunnels of the Serapeum
• Reveals that highly refined tools and mega-machines were used in ancient Egypt
From the pyramids in the north to the temples in the south, ancient artisans left their marks all over Egypt, unique marks that reveal craftsmanship we would be hard pressed to duplicate today. Drawing together the results of more than 30 years of research and nine field study journeys to Egypt, Christopher Dunn presents a stunning stone-by-stone analysis of key Egyptian monuments, including the statue of Ramses II at Luxor and the fallen crowns that lay at its feet. His modern-day engineering expertise provides a unique view into the sophisticated technology used to create these famous monuments in prehistoric times.
Using modern digital photography, computer-aided design software, and metrology instruments, Dunn exposes the extreme precision of these monuments and the type of advanced manufacturing expertise necessary to produce them. His computer analysis of the statues of Ramses II reveals that the left and right sides of the faces are precise mirror images of each other, and his examination of the mysterious underground tunnels of the Serapeum illuminates the finest examples of precision engineering on the planet. Providing never-before-seen evidence in the form of more than 280 photographs, Dunn’s research shows that while absent from the archaeological record, highly refined tools, techniques, and even mega-machines must have been used in ancient Egypt.
400 pages, Paperback
First published June 24, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
August 28, 2015
I came across "Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt" in a review of a history on Egypt I had recently read. I most probably would not have given the book a second look but for the excellent reviews it received.
With a 21st Century Engineers eye for detail and through careful analysis of a number of Ancient Egyptian monuments (pyramids, temples, obelisks and statutes), Christopher Dunn asserts that sophisticated tools were used in their construction. Not the simple wood, stone and copper tools normally described in the history books. Basically nothing in the historical record explains the precision, finish and evidence of machining which are hallmarks of this ancient architecture!
An excellent book backed up by plenty of engineering research and analysis, which challenges traditional ideas on Ancient Egyptian construction. For me the only thing missing from this book is identification of the sophisticated tools which the author asserts were used!
With a 21st Century Engineers eye for detail and through careful analysis of a number of Ancient Egyptian monuments (pyramids, temples, obelisks and statutes), Christopher Dunn asserts that sophisticated tools were used in their construction. Not the simple wood, stone and copper tools normally described in the history books. Basically nothing in the historical record explains the precision, finish and evidence of machining which are hallmarks of this ancient architecture!
An excellent book backed up by plenty of engineering research and analysis, which challenges traditional ideas on Ancient Egyptian construction. For me the only thing missing from this book is identification of the sophisticated tools which the author asserts were used!
March 29, 2019
The author, a craftsman who worked in an aerospace manufacturing company, became enamoured years before this book with the engineering proficiency on display at many magnificent sites in Egypt. First he wrote a technical book furthering the hypothesis, quite compellingly, that at least the Great Pyramid of Giza was a power plant created in deep antiquity. In comparison the present book is less interesting, as it focuses on studying statues and artifacts and the toolmarks left by their creators, toolmarks that evidence that some advanced machining was involved, in contradiction to the orthodox narrative that primitive tools such as diorite balls, copper hammers, etc. were responsible. As mentioned in the author's previous book, and mentioned by other authors, the toolmarks on many artifacts in Egypt show evidence of having been made with tools that had very high feed rates (distance travelled during one spindle revolution), or altogether a different form than what they were supposed to have. There is also clear indication that they used jewel tipped tools for very careful engraving, which they weren't supposed to have either.
The orthodox narrative for the technological capabilities of ancient civilizations goes quite neatly from stone age to bronze age to iron age. There's no real reason why it would be that way; are we really to believe that a civilization such as Egypt, that left the most advanced monuments and statues of the ancient world (such as the pyramids or the Ramses statue at Luxor), whether or not they were actually made by the dynastic Egyptians, didn't improve their tools in around 2,000 years? The usual argument against those tools existing is simple: no such tool has been found, officially at least; Egyptology is infamously shady in claiming that certain things don't exist, such as passages into the Sphynx or under it, even though the leading Egyptologist then, Zahi Hawass, had been photographed going into them. To put another example, they have closed down investigations when they found them inconvenient, such as the debacle in the nineties when a robot went into a passage in the Great Pyramid and found a "door" with metallic "handles". However, the remains of the tools that would have been needed to produce the artifacts and monuments according to the official narrative haven't been found either: masonry involving stone in the 7-8 hardness scale with copper tools would have eaten through thousands and thousands of those tools; the author mentions that it's like cutting aluminum with butter.
Additionally, there's an immense divide between actual engineers and craftmen visiting the sites and studying the masonry and artifacts and the archeologists/Egyptologists' idea of how they were made. The craftmen know that those artifacts were obviously made with machining, whether powered or not, and with tools more advanced than the likes of copper hammers and diorite balls. Meanwhile, Egyptologists such as Mark Lehner attempted to reproduce how the stones were worked back then through banging diorite balls against them. In hours of painful work he had barely made a dent of millimeters, and they were satisfied with the explanation. It seems ludicrous to me that work teams thousands of years ago would have tolerated such pitiful progress, not to mention that the scoop marks in places such as the famous unfinished obelisk at the Aswan quarry don't match the toolmarks of diorite balls. Other attempts to reproduce Egyptian monuments have ended with the modern workers giving up and using modern methods, because the "historical" ones were unworkable.
While studying carefully one of the artifacts that Petri, a Victorian Egyptologist, had written about as having strange toolmarks, it speaks to the author's integrity that he debunked his own hypothesis of ultrasonic machining having been used because it would have explained the toolmarks that Petri mentioned. However, it remains puzzling that the tool used cut faster through quartz than the surrounding material although quartz is tougher.
The author brought up Robert Schoch and other geologists' "intrusion" into archeology; Schoch studied the erosional patterns in the bedrock from which the Sphynx and the nearby temple were made, and the pluvial erosion evidenced that the Sphynx must have been made 7,000 years ago at the very latest (with more reasonable estimates landing it in the last Ice Age, more than 12,900 years ago). The Egyptologists and archeologists in general have rejected that evidence because it goes completely against the narrative. Part of the rejection involves that the orthodox narrative doesn't allow for any civilization to be able to produce complex masonry 7,000 years ago, but we know that is simply false: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, not very far away from Egypt, dates back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE according to its Wikipedia entry, and it looks like this:
In somewhat of a miracle, Göbekli Tepe can be traced unequivocally to those dates at the very latest, because the whole site was buried deliberately for some unknown reason. I wonder how I haven't read a book on Göbekli Tepe directly. Maybe there wasn't a good one last I checked. Predictably, the official story about it is that it belonged to a "skull cult". Had to be a cult, or an altar, or a temple; otherwise it would have made no sense for them, I guess.
Obviously you can't carbon date stone, and the dating gets tremendously muddled given that whoever ended up living in the same area as some artifacts or monuments left their own carbon-dateable remains. In fact, many of the artifacts that we know as Egyptian could have been made by a completely different civilization thousands of years earlier. The author himself mentions this regarding the puzzling stone boxes at the Serapeum of Saqqara. It's more likely that the Ptolemaic rulers simply used that underground site to store other stuff, because there's no direct correlation between the boxes and other remains found there by modern archeologists. This idea of many of the most complex artifacts having been made in the deep antiquity would also explain why the tools wouldn't have been found: the metal would have eroded away or have been repurposed by the people that inhabited those lands later on. There are plenty of cases like this in South America for example, where the stones of complex buildings showed the following features:
Poured and hardened metal would have joined those stones, but the metal invariably went missing over the years, whether or not it was stolen or eroded away. However, in cases where some landslide had buried those structures and modern archeologists unearthed them, the metal that joined those stones was in place.
All in all, this book is another piece in the argument that there was some Ice Age civilization(s) that collapsed with the cataclysm that produced the Younger Dryas and that left remains all over the world that have been misattributed according to the ideologies and political positions of cultures that came thousands of years later.
The orthodox narrative for the technological capabilities of ancient civilizations goes quite neatly from stone age to bronze age to iron age. There's no real reason why it would be that way; are we really to believe that a civilization such as Egypt, that left the most advanced monuments and statues of the ancient world (such as the pyramids or the Ramses statue at Luxor), whether or not they were actually made by the dynastic Egyptians, didn't improve their tools in around 2,000 years? The usual argument against those tools existing is simple: no such tool has been found, officially at least; Egyptology is infamously shady in claiming that certain things don't exist, such as passages into the Sphynx or under it, even though the leading Egyptologist then, Zahi Hawass, had been photographed going into them. To put another example, they have closed down investigations when they found them inconvenient, such as the debacle in the nineties when a robot went into a passage in the Great Pyramid and found a "door" with metallic "handles". However, the remains of the tools that would have been needed to produce the artifacts and monuments according to the official narrative haven't been found either: masonry involving stone in the 7-8 hardness scale with copper tools would have eaten through thousands and thousands of those tools; the author mentions that it's like cutting aluminum with butter.
Additionally, there's an immense divide between actual engineers and craftmen visiting the sites and studying the masonry and artifacts and the archeologists/Egyptologists' idea of how they were made. The craftmen know that those artifacts were obviously made with machining, whether powered or not, and with tools more advanced than the likes of copper hammers and diorite balls. Meanwhile, Egyptologists such as Mark Lehner attempted to reproduce how the stones were worked back then through banging diorite balls against them. In hours of painful work he had barely made a dent of millimeters, and they were satisfied with the explanation. It seems ludicrous to me that work teams thousands of years ago would have tolerated such pitiful progress, not to mention that the scoop marks in places such as the famous unfinished obelisk at the Aswan quarry don't match the toolmarks of diorite balls. Other attempts to reproduce Egyptian monuments have ended with the modern workers giving up and using modern methods, because the "historical" ones were unworkable.
While studying carefully one of the artifacts that Petri, a Victorian Egyptologist, had written about as having strange toolmarks, it speaks to the author's integrity that he debunked his own hypothesis of ultrasonic machining having been used because it would have explained the toolmarks that Petri mentioned. However, it remains puzzling that the tool used cut faster through quartz than the surrounding material although quartz is tougher.
The author brought up Robert Schoch and other geologists' "intrusion" into archeology; Schoch studied the erosional patterns in the bedrock from which the Sphynx and the nearby temple were made, and the pluvial erosion evidenced that the Sphynx must have been made 7,000 years ago at the very latest (with more reasonable estimates landing it in the last Ice Age, more than 12,900 years ago). The Egyptologists and archeologists in general have rejected that evidence because it goes completely against the narrative. Part of the rejection involves that the orthodox narrative doesn't allow for any civilization to be able to produce complex masonry 7,000 years ago, but we know that is simply false: Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, not very far away from Egypt, dates back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE according to its Wikipedia entry, and it looks like this:
In somewhat of a miracle, Göbekli Tepe can be traced unequivocally to those dates at the very latest, because the whole site was buried deliberately for some unknown reason. I wonder how I haven't read a book on Göbekli Tepe directly. Maybe there wasn't a good one last I checked. Predictably, the official story about it is that it belonged to a "skull cult". Had to be a cult, or an altar, or a temple; otherwise it would have made no sense for them, I guess.
Obviously you can't carbon date stone, and the dating gets tremendously muddled given that whoever ended up living in the same area as some artifacts or monuments left their own carbon-dateable remains. In fact, many of the artifacts that we know as Egyptian could have been made by a completely different civilization thousands of years earlier. The author himself mentions this regarding the puzzling stone boxes at the Serapeum of Saqqara. It's more likely that the Ptolemaic rulers simply used that underground site to store other stuff, because there's no direct correlation between the boxes and other remains found there by modern archeologists. This idea of many of the most complex artifacts having been made in the deep antiquity would also explain why the tools wouldn't have been found: the metal would have eroded away or have been repurposed by the people that inhabited those lands later on. There are plenty of cases like this in South America for example, where the stones of complex buildings showed the following features:
Poured and hardened metal would have joined those stones, but the metal invariably went missing over the years, whether or not it was stolen or eroded away. However, in cases where some landslide had buried those structures and modern archeologists unearthed them, the metal that joined those stones was in place.
All in all, this book is another piece in the argument that there was some Ice Age civilization(s) that collapsed with the cataclysm that produced the Younger Dryas and that left remains all over the world that have been misattributed according to the ideologies and political positions of cultures that came thousands of years later.
November 21, 2010
Fantastic informative!
If like me you find ancient technology, history and theory's of unknown technology fascinating, then this is such an eye opener.... Is raises many questions that established Egyptian teachings just cannot be correct.
I for one am convinced by mr Dunn's overwhelming observations and measurements that there is undoubted ancient machinery waiting to be discovered!
If like me you find ancient technology, history and theory's of unknown technology fascinating, then this is such an eye opener.... Is raises many questions that established Egyptian teachings just cannot be correct.
I for one am convinced by mr Dunn's overwhelming observations and measurements that there is undoubted ancient machinery waiting to be discovered!
August 6, 2013
Wow !!! What a great read. Christopher Dunn makes a great case for the extremely advanced methods of the ancient Egyptians in rendering their plethora of monuments in some of the hardest rock known to man. Traditional archeologists hold fast to the untenable position that these sculptures and other works were honed to amazing perfection with the crudest of tools. The author makes a very good case that this is nearly impossible. He posits that the ancient Egyptians possessed supstoneerior knowledge of stoneworking and construction. He conducts practical experiments himself and studies the experiments of others. It is a book with plenty of illustrations and photographs which bring the subject much closer than other similar books on the topic. This is completely necessary for the reader to make an informed opinion on what is being reported. I read "The Giza Power Plant" first. This book takes the reader deeper into the subject at hand so as to make a stronger case. I plan to read his other books as well. Hope he writes one on Tiahuanaco and Machu Picchu.
June 7, 2024
Technically dense in many areas, but well-researched. May this pave the way for a more serious look at advanced technologies described in India’s Vedas, Purana, and two epics.
January 30, 2014
I picked up this book to see what it had to say about technologies in ancient Egypt, this is another subject covered by the Ancient Alien show. (See my review on Bhagavad Gita.) I thought it would be a book that I could speed read and I would complete it in a couple of days, but that was not the case. This book is written by an engineer who was trying to prove that just because the archeological record has yet to discover the technology that helped to build the pyramids, and carve the three dimensional relief’s at the Temple of Denderah, etc; that the tools that archeologists have located to date could not possible have been used to create these works.
I found the book to be quite interesting, although there was some redundancy while attempting to prove his points. The photos were excellent, even though they were in black and white. His arguments were tantalizing, the history that he offered was awesome. I learned more in this book than I had imagined possible; including the history of the obelisk that stands in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
I am giving this book a four star rating, simply because of the redundancy during argument; but I believe this man has truly made his argument for technology having been lost.
I found the book to be quite interesting, although there was some redundancy while attempting to prove his points. The photos were excellent, even though they were in black and white. His arguments were tantalizing, the history that he offered was awesome. I learned more in this book than I had imagined possible; including the history of the obelisk that stands in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.
I am giving this book a four star rating, simply because of the redundancy during argument; but I believe this man has truly made his argument for technology having been lost.
July 11, 2011
Anyone who can appreciate the level of difficulty involved in achieving three-dimensional geometrical perfection in a sculpture will be blown away by Christopher Dunn's research and revelations. From engineers to artists, you will learn that the technologies of our ancient cultures extended beyond our wildest dreams!
October 10, 2020
Evidence of machine tool marks on several stone works in Egypt. I heard of Christopher Dunn from the "Ancient Aliens" show --he himself does not subscribe to the theory. However, he is a firm believer in an advanced civilization, using advanced engineering techniques, to accomplish these works. He makes a very compelling argument.
Personally, I think the advanced ancient civilization might have been aliens, or influenced by them technologically. Whatever you believe, this is a pretty interesting read on a somewhat dry subject. Recommended.
Personally, I think the advanced ancient civilization might have been aliens, or influenced by them technologically. Whatever you believe, this is a pretty interesting read on a somewhat dry subject. Recommended.
March 30, 2012
Christopher Dunn shares some amazing insight into the 'hows' of some of the most famous architecture of ancient Egypt came to be constructed. I appreciate how detailed he is in describing the precise geometry, and his hypothesis about the types of machining that would be needed to create such magnificent buildings and sculpture.
This book takes a while to read - especially if you are engineered-challenged like I am, but it is well worth the time.
This book takes a while to read - especially if you are engineered-challenged like I am, but it is well worth the time.
August 31, 2012
Very interesting look at the precision in execution of the monolithic stone statues of Egypt's past. A bit heavy on the mathmatic terms but this is strickly from the view point of an engineer with a background in manufacturing/fabrication. This is not wishy washy semi-science, he approaches it with hard engineering terms. Which only emphasies the brilliance that is sometimes masked by the clean lined beauty and simplicity of Egypt's greatest ancient works.
January 9, 2018
Some excellent research and precise analysis is somewhat spoiled by a stilted writing style and repetition. It's only in the last few chapters that the book really gets going. Up to that point, the author comes across as a bit of a hobby amateur. With a decent co-writer, this book could have been a winner.
July 8, 2023
I think this is a pretty important book on a subject that I don't think gets enough attention -- of the right kind. The alien theorists pretty much own the PR space when it comes to explaining the incredible achievements of the civilizations that built huge monuments.
There are two main categories of inexplicable or nearly inexplicable achievements: the size and scope of monuments and the precision of artifacts. The first category, deservedly, gets a lot of attention, but in this book author Christopher Dunn focuses on examples of precision machining and finishing of hard stone monuments that should be impossible in a civilization that does not have steel (or even iron) or machine tools.
He is a working expert in precision machining and well acquainted with the techniques and history of his craft. He's made many trips to Egypt, and read the small amount of literature which attempts to explain how Ancient Egyptians fabricated and built statues, temples and monuments of amazing exactness.
This is a very dense book and well illustrated. If you're interested at all in this topic I think it's a must.
Even though I think it could have been improved by editing, the points he makes and the details and illustrations he provides are excellent.
Writing this review in 2023, I would add that, even though this was published in 2010, and Dunn had access to good quality digital camera equipment and advanced (for the time) computer graphics and CAD software, many of the experiments and research he did would have been so much easier and indisputable if he had access to 3D laser digitizers. (For instance, he believes that the huge statutes at Luxor, and particularly their heads, have an inhuman exactness of symmetry. But since the heads are at the top of 40 ft tall statutes, he has to infer the measurements from photos taken at floor level and trigonometry. A 3D scan would have allowed him to make any measurements of the statue to millimeter precision.)
But this equipment is extremely expensive even today, even to rent, and requires skill and experience to use. As I read the book, so often I see the difficulty he had in making precise measurements of objects that were either inaccessible and/or protected from being moved.
Dunn doesn't hide his awe at the achievements of the ancient builders. But he does not attribute those accomplishments to alien or supernatural causes. Mysteriously, no machines or tools of the kind that he thinks they must have used have yet been excavated. But there is still hope in this; a good example being the recovery and identifcation of the amazing Antikythera mechanism, showing a level of mechanical complexity that was previously unthought of for the era of 100-200 BC. And as pointed out in wikipedia, the sophistication of that device seems to imply a period of development that stretches back earlier than that. [Last modified 2023-07-07]
There are two main categories of inexplicable or nearly inexplicable achievements: the size and scope of monuments and the precision of artifacts. The first category, deservedly, gets a lot of attention, but in this book author Christopher Dunn focuses on examples of precision machining and finishing of hard stone monuments that should be impossible in a civilization that does not have steel (or even iron) or machine tools.
He is a working expert in precision machining and well acquainted with the techniques and history of his craft. He's made many trips to Egypt, and read the small amount of literature which attempts to explain how Ancient Egyptians fabricated and built statues, temples and monuments of amazing exactness.
This is a very dense book and well illustrated. If you're interested at all in this topic I think it's a must.
Even though I think it could have been improved by editing, the points he makes and the details and illustrations he provides are excellent.
Writing this review in 2023, I would add that, even though this was published in 2010, and Dunn had access to good quality digital camera equipment and advanced (for the time) computer graphics and CAD software, many of the experiments and research he did would have been so much easier and indisputable if he had access to 3D laser digitizers. (For instance, he believes that the huge statutes at Luxor, and particularly their heads, have an inhuman exactness of symmetry. But since the heads are at the top of 40 ft tall statutes, he has to infer the measurements from photos taken at floor level and trigonometry. A 3D scan would have allowed him to make any measurements of the statue to millimeter precision.)
But this equipment is extremely expensive even today, even to rent, and requires skill and experience to use. As I read the book, so often I see the difficulty he had in making precise measurements of objects that were either inaccessible and/or protected from being moved.
Dunn doesn't hide his awe at the achievements of the ancient builders. But he does not attribute those accomplishments to alien or supernatural causes. Mysteriously, no machines or tools of the kind that he thinks they must have used have yet been excavated. But there is still hope in this; a good example being the recovery and identifcation of the amazing Antikythera mechanism, showing a level of mechanical complexity that was previously unthought of for the era of 100-200 BC. And as pointed out in wikipedia, the sophistication of that device seems to imply a period of development that stretches back earlier than that. [Last modified 2023-07-07]
February 15, 2024
Finally an answer
Having spent around forty years in the computer and network industry after doing my bit for the American army as an artillery fire direction control calculator I am very impressed by the work Mr. Dunn has volunteered to do so we may glimpse our own history. To me his precise investigations speak of the highest standards of true science and add confidence to his theories based on that work. From the earliest times those who claim to be the vessels of truth and knowledge have almost unanimously tried to suppress any attempt to question what the anointed experts have claimed as truth. This may be human nature, to grow conservative and defensive with age, and at my age I can see some safety in questioning everything, demanding proof of any new attempt to explain that which we don't understand. Even the less admirable temptation to protect reputation, power, and position is to be expected, but surely scientists should be above all philosophers which means lovers of the truth. Every great university claims they are. I hope the true greats will want to help men like Dunn to learn and teach all of us the truth of our past. If there was another forgotten civilization at the end of the last ice age or even before and it was wiped out leaving only pockets of their technology to restart the survivors whether intentionally or accidentally, why would we not want to know that? There are too many unexplainable things like what Dunn is investigating, some mysteriously buried like time capsules apparently. Maybe Elon Musk is right to want humanity to hurry to become a multi planet civilization as an insurance against one day becoming perhaps the first, only, and last intelligent species nature ever stumbled on in her "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" way. The universe is huge and cold and appears not to even care about life itself surviving, much less intelligent life. We should care what happened before us.
Having spent around forty years in the computer and network industry after doing my bit for the American army as an artillery fire direction control calculator I am very impressed by the work Mr. Dunn has volunteered to do so we may glimpse our own history. To me his precise investigations speak of the highest standards of true science and add confidence to his theories based on that work. From the earliest times those who claim to be the vessels of truth and knowledge have almost unanimously tried to suppress any attempt to question what the anointed experts have claimed as truth. This may be human nature, to grow conservative and defensive with age, and at my age I can see some safety in questioning everything, demanding proof of any new attempt to explain that which we don't understand. Even the less admirable temptation to protect reputation, power, and position is to be expected, but surely scientists should be above all philosophers which means lovers of the truth. Every great university claims they are. I hope the true greats will want to help men like Dunn to learn and teach all of us the truth of our past. If there was another forgotten civilization at the end of the last ice age or even before and it was wiped out leaving only pockets of their technology to restart the survivors whether intentionally or accidentally, why would we not want to know that? There are too many unexplainable things like what Dunn is investigating, some mysteriously buried like time capsules apparently. Maybe Elon Musk is right to want humanity to hurry to become a multi planet civilization as an insurance against one day becoming perhaps the first, only, and last intelligent species nature ever stumbled on in her "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" way. The universe is huge and cold and appears not to even care about life itself surviving, much less intelligent life. We should care what happened before us.
February 21, 2020
This book is definitely outside the scope of the (already quite varied) range of books I would normally consider to read. I did find it interesting, and it did compel part of me to want to go to Egypt to see these monuments and wonders up close, but...
The writing style is not polished, there is a lot of conjecture and less fact, the evidence provided appears to be a bit outside the scope of my understanding for machining/stonework/tooling, but...
I was intrigued. I could have done with less of the repetitive phrases (he really does repeat himself quite often, over and over and over, throughout the book - in fact you could probably trim 50 pages off the book if you prune out the endless comparisons between the status quo of Egyptology and his declarations of advanced machinery assistance in cutting and forming the stone for these various monuments).
This book represents opportunity and fortune (having just read Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and having a heightened interest in marvelous works of antiquity + finding this book by chance through my Overdrive e-reader app). I wouldn't' necessarily recommend this book to anyone, but it did give me insights into the way things were made at the highest levels thousands of years ago, and I am somehow the more informed for having partaken.
The writing style is not polished, there is a lot of conjecture and less fact, the evidence provided appears to be a bit outside the scope of my understanding for machining/stonework/tooling, but...
I was intrigued. I could have done with less of the repetitive phrases (he really does repeat himself quite often, over and over and over, throughout the book - in fact you could probably trim 50 pages off the book if you prune out the endless comparisons between the status quo of Egyptology and his declarations of advanced machinery assistance in cutting and forming the stone for these various monuments).
This book represents opportunity and fortune (having just read Cosmos by Carl Sagan, and having a heightened interest in marvelous works of antiquity + finding this book by chance through my Overdrive e-reader app). I wouldn't' necessarily recommend this book to anyone, but it did give me insights into the way things were made at the highest levels thousands of years ago, and I am somehow the more informed for having partaken.
October 12, 2020
Solid like the works themselves
Whenever alternative theories about the past are presented, people ought to be skeptical. When a trained expert develops such a theory because the current paradigm is lacking, we should be careful not to misread him. You will not find flights of fantasy here but a rigorous examination of what technologies would be required to explain some amazing art and architecture. I cannot verify the claims here, but I can appreciate that these claims need to be taken seriously. If our mainstream experts are to maintain their objections, they need to show how the ancient Egyptians were able to do what we would use computers for.
Whenever alternative theories about the past are presented, people ought to be skeptical. When a trained expert develops such a theory because the current paradigm is lacking, we should be careful not to misread him. You will not find flights of fantasy here but a rigorous examination of what technologies would be required to explain some amazing art and architecture. I cannot verify the claims here, but I can appreciate that these claims need to be taken seriously. If our mainstream experts are to maintain their objections, they need to show how the ancient Egyptians were able to do what we would use computers for.
January 1, 2025
Dunn makes a convincing case that the ancients had advanced machining that did not survive the archeological record. It's not a case of modern people underestimating what the ancients were capable of, but the opposite. It follows the common-sense notion that, if you give great craftsmen thousands of years to develop their craft, they're going to develop great tools as well. And he provides good evidence that the artifacts show signs of advanced tooling. A fascinating book.
January 1, 2023
Ancient High technology?
Was hoping to see actual evidence for a ancient high technology. Just saw flim flam. Just questions that could be answered by visiting a good, traditional stone mason.
Was hoping to see actual evidence for a ancient high technology. Just saw flim flam. Just questions that could be answered by visiting a good, traditional stone mason.
May 27, 2023
Excellent research based on the author's expertise (as an engineer) and his travels to Egypt. This work and the work by James E. Brown shed the best light on the pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt.
June 6, 2024
Another well researched book by Christopher Dunn. He clearly shows his understanding of engineering and manufacturing. He goes into great detail on how precise the megalithic structures of ancient Egypt were built. He makes a compelling case for lost technologies that helped build the pyramids.
February 22, 2019
Un libro bastante informativo, sobre como en el antiguo Egipto se usaron técnicas avanzadas para esculpir y mover rocas para generar resultados maravillosos que perduran por miles de años.
December 15, 2022
Game changer for the 200 years old Egyptology! Totally different perspective for a highly advanced sophisticated civilization!!!
July 3, 2025
Dunn really has a way with words. Thorough and decisive. A thought provoking read. I appreciate the scientific approach rather than woo-woo, pie-in-the-sky rants.
May 2, 2021
Still a very interesting and eye opening book but not as good as his first book
June 2, 2025
Really a DNF. Will probably pick this back up someday. I'm a construction worker and Egyptian tech has always fascinated me.
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