I recently read your book regarding the construction of the pyramids and was impressed with the overall coherence of the theory. Hopefully, in the future, popular opinion will swing in your favor so that you might be allowed to take pyramid samples of your own. This theory is strangely prone to ridicule, yet resistant to attack.
Upon finishing the book, I was left with the impression that the case for the artificiality of the limestone pyramid blocks was stronger than the case for the artificial hard stones. Is the recipe for egyptain hard stone known, and can it be replicated? Do the physical properties differ from natural stone? How can one prove that a hard stone object is not carved from a natural block, but instead made from solidified man made material? I use the generic term hard stone as I am assuming the manufacture of artificial basalt, diorite, and granite involve the same process with different agglomerate.
Is it possible for the Egyptians to have poured molten stone into molds? I understand that molten basalt will produce diorite when cooled slowly. Molten diorite apparently will produce granite when cooled slowly. Could the addition of any substance (such as water) to the rock lower the melting temperature to a range the Egyptians could produce?
By answering to this message I would like to take the opportunity to state the following:
I do not want to be involved in any controversy dealing with artefacts made in Egyptian granite. My work and my revised book concentrate on the materials that constitute the bulk of the pyramids: limestone, sandstone, mud, additionally quartzite. I can replicate the hardening of these materials in my lab and I am only dealing with technologies that I can master. With respect to granite, I have started a research program dealing with EUROPEAN granite artefacts. The results are promising and I hope they will provide new clues as far as the EGYPTIAN granite is concerned. However, as long as I am not ready, I shall decline any discussion dealing with this topic.
As for your suggestion on smelting/cooling hard stone, we know of the making of artificial basalt in Mesopotamia (see the paper published in magazine Science: From Shifting Silt to Solid Stone, The Manufacture of Synthetic Basalt in Ancient Mesopotamia, by E.C. Stone and al., Science, Vol. 280, 26 June 1998, page 2091). We do not know so far if this is an unicum or an accident.
What I am trying to achieve in my lab is to get hard stone features WITHOUT SMELTING AND SOLIDIFYING stone mixtures. All mineralogical analysis performed on Egyptian hard stone artefacts (stone vases) dating from the Old Kingdom demonstrate that the hard stone is not a recently (young) recrystallized, slowly solidified matrix. The hard stones are in their great majority NEVER SOUND but strongly affected by SAUSSURITIZATION. This strange term, saussuritization, is used by geologists and petrographers when describing the alteration of hard stone constituent FELDSPAR to albite, epidote, calcite, sericite and/or zeolite.
In other word this strange geological term suggests geopolymerization, not smelting and slowly cooling. We always get this saussuritization mechanism when, in my lab, we solidify hard stone replicates obtained by the agglomeration of feldspar aggregates and modern geopolymer binder.
Joseph Davidovits
