Forgotten Ages Research

Ancient Accounts of Automatons and Other Machinery

Product ID: OPA4

Report Topics:

• Story of the Talos automaton and its curious mechanical elements in Greek legend
• Testimonies of Plato, Aristotle and Homer to the existence of ancient robotic “servants”
• The out-of-place “flywheel” from a First Dynasty Egyptian tomb at Saqqara
• Pictographs of “nanobots” from fourth Millennium B.C.E. China?
• Arthur C. Clarke on the difficulties of recognizing advanced forms of technology
• Evidence from ancient China of sophisticated stone-cutting and polishing
• Signs of prehistoric high-speed dental drilling found in Pakistan 8,000 years old
• Sir Flinders Petrie’s nineteenth century studies of extraordinary Predynastic stone-cutting skills
• A modern American engineer’s recent discoveries of machine-precision stonework inside the Great Pyramid and elsewhere along the Nile
• Report Update—Alternative Views About the Saqqara Flywheel Answered

Full Report:

According to both Minoan and Hellenic legends, the island of Crete was once guarded by a giant automaton made of bronze called Talos or Talus. It was said to be able to stride around the entire coastline of the island in a set path in a single 24-hour day, which would mean that its average traveling speed was over 150 miles an hour. The machine’s main purpose was to prevent any foreign ships from landing, which it did by hurling great rocks and sinking them. If anyone managed to reach the shore, Talos would walk through fire until its bronze body glowed red, then threw its arms around the survivors and burnt them alive. The deadly robot’s other purpose was to prevent anyone from leaving Crete without the permission of King Minas. Also, three times a month it swiftly journeyed through every Minoan city and village, carrying large tablets of the laws of the land and punishing all those who did not keep them.

Where did this strange mechanical being come from? One myth points to Zeus having been the source, for in the Minoan language “talus” means the sun, and a title of the ruler of the Olympian gods, as the deity of the sun, was Zeus Tallaios. This would also suggest that the internal self-sustaining energy source for the automaton may have been solar power. Zeus, who was said to have been king of the world long before present humanity was created, gave Talos as a gift to his lover Europa when he brought her to Crete in a long-forgotten prehistoric age. A second legend, however, describes the primordial god Hephaestus, the metal-worker of Mount Olympus, as the robot’s original creator, along with the Cyclops who represented another pre-human race lost in dim antiquity.

The most famous encounter with Talos was chronicled by Apollodorus of Rhodes, in his epic poem Argonautica, the story of the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. When Jason and his companions tried to land on the Creatan shore to find supplies, the bronze machine suddenly appeared and nearly sank the Argos with his catapulting of great boulders. But the enchantress Medea cast a spell on the robot, diverting his aim toward invisible “ghosts,” and while it was so preoccupied, Jason was able to disable it. Through a “vein” or conduit running from Talos’ head to his feet flowed a mysterious oily substance known as “divine ichors” or “blood of the gods” which both animated the machine and lubricated all its joints (petroleum?). Coming up from behind it, Jason loosened a “bronze nail” in the heel of the automaton, its oily “blood” leaked out, and Talos crashed to the ground never to move again.

That this was considered an actual historical event can be seen in its commemoration on Minoan coins found at Phaistos dating to the fourth century B.C.E. depicting the bronze giant’s heel pierced by an arrow—shades of Achilles in later Greek legends. A red-painted Hellenic vase from the fifth century portrays demigod heroes ensnaring the dying Talos, with the enchantress Medea standing in front of the Argo ship and holding her bag of spells.

Most significant is that the author Apollodorus believed the Talos robot to have been a leftover from a former era. Greek historians spoke of bygone Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron, long before the Age of Demigods and the Human Age of Stone were born. Each past period had had its own mythical inhabitants and its own fabulous civilization before being destroyed. The Talos automaton, according to the Greek poet, was a surviving relic from the distant Age of Bronze which disappeared long before recorded history began.

Whatever legacy of robotics the Greeks gained from the Talos machine, it appears to have been put to many uses in the classical world. Occult philosopher Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettsheim, writing in the sixteenth century, noted in his study of ancient Hellenic sources how extensive the existence of robots was two millennia before his time:

“According to Plato’s assertions, things very similar to natural things could be devised, thanks to the mathematical sciences, like walking and talking bodies which are not imbued by the life force. Of this kind were of old the works of Daedalus, called automatons, which Aristotle mentions. Also were the tripods of Vulcan (the Roman name for the Greek Hephastus) and Daedalus which were capable of self-motion, and which Homer tells us voluntarily went into battle. And those of Hiarbus which moved by themselves at banquets, and golden statues of the same host which served guests as cup-bearers and waiters.”

Agrippa’s commentary on Homer is based on the eighth century B.C.E. poet’s description in his Iliad of mechanical maid-servants endowed with speech and intelligence, and three-legged “tables” that moved back and forth on wheels to deliver various objects to different locations by voice command.

Agrippa also spoke of the Greeks and other ancients having “messengers of iron” which had the added ability of flying through the air and were employed to send communications over long distances.

We may well ask, what happened to these mechanical devices, and where are they today? Have any survived the deterioration of the ages, still buried il lost tombs or storehouses yet to be discovered? And would we today be able to recognize them for what they are, once we found them?

There have been times when out-of-place machine parts show up in the oddest places. In 1936 what can only be described as a technologically sophisticated “flywheel” was discovered not far from Giza at Saqqara, in the tomb of Sabu, the son of Pharaoh Adjib of the First Dynasty, dated to 3100 B.C.E. Today it is displayed in the Cairo Museum in Room No. 43 along with other small miscellaneous objects from the early Dynasties. Egyptologist Walter B. Emery was among the first to describe the find as a “bowl-like vessel of schist,” and noted further, “No satisfactory explanation of the curious design of this object has been forthcoming.” Author and Pharaonic expert Cyril Aldred made the additional observation that the anomaly, “possibly imitates a form originally made of metal.”

The ancient flywheel is circular overall, measuring close to 24 inches in diameter. In its exact center is a prominent hole which appears to have once fit onto an axle, and the object was spun around it. Coming off the central axis are three very avant-garde-looking blade-like protrusions that look like they belong more on a twenty-first century machine and not on a five millennia old tomb artifact. The three blades are joined together at their outer edges by a single ring forming a circumference.

What is curious is this flywheel is very delicate, not more than four inches in diameter with the outer ring being uniformally only a fraction of an inch thick, yet the whole thing was carved out of schist, a type of stone that is very brittle and extremely difficult to shape. How this could have been accomplished is only the first mystery; the second enigma is that, if the object had been actually spun on an axle, the centrifugal force would have easily broken it into pieces. As Aldred and other Egypt experts believe, the only answer is that the schist artifact must have served as a model for something older that had been made from metal, for only as a metal flywheel would the original object have remained intact when subjected to high-speed rotation.

Researcher-author Zecharia Sitchin, who has done a technical analysis of the ancient flywheel, feels that its advanced design suggests that it was meant to spin in a liquid medium of some sort. The purpose of modern flywheels, as they have been utilized industrially over the past two centuries, is to either regulate speed of rotation, or to store energy. Sitchin discovered that one modern company, Airesearch Manufacturing, has developed for the space program a light-rimmed multi-bladed flywheel which is sealed within a housing filled with lubricating liquid. The design bears an uncanny resemblance to its far older counterpart from the Nile valley.

What is important to note is that the ancient flywheel is totally unique and has no precedent in the archaeological record, either in Egypt or anywhere else. What happened to the lost technology for which this stone model may be its only tangible memory?

Our modern technology is beginning to work with both large machines and miniscule machines, the latter in the form of what some developers are calling nanobots. A team of researchers at South Korea’s Chonnam National University have constructed crablike nanobots small than the thickness of a fingenail, and once injected into a living body are powered by contractions of the heart. As the heart beats, the nanobot’s six aligned “legs” are pulled together and drawn apart, propelling it through the bloodstream to its intended target area. The tiny machine’s purpose will one day be to deliver clot-busting agents to clogged vessels, or for administering drugs and medicines to specific locations.

What is amazing is that the designs now on the drawing boards for these biocompatible nanobots look exactly like certain pictographs and amalgam script symbols used in ancient Chinese writing, especially the oldest forms as depicted on the famed Oracle Bones from before 3000 B.C.E. Did a forgotten civilization predating known history once possess nanotechnology, and the configurations of their nanobots were later remembered by the survivors only as writing symbols? Just as important is the question, do the nanobots themselves still exist somewhere, relics from a lost age, perhaps sealed away inside a hidden Hall of Records? Could there be in fact whole storehouses of nano-records waiting to be found?

Most non-mechanically minded scholars do not realize that there are products of technology which do not resemble what we call machines—without shafts, rods or gears. As examples, a network of lines traced with special metal-containing ink on specially treated paper can serve as a receiver for electromagnetic waves; a simple copper tube can serve as a resonator in the production of high frequency waves; and the surface of a diamond can be made to contain an image of the pages of one hundred thousand encyclopedia-sized books.

As technology advances, its methods and forms are often simplified and may not be recognizable to a civilization of inferior knowledge and understanding. Many out-of-place artifacts, particularly of a so-called “mechanical” or “electrical” nature exhibit signs of a technology that not only matches our own, but in some cases surpasses it. Some of these artifacts seem so fantastic that we simply cannot grasp their significance. As Arthur C. Clarke once stated:

“The more advanced a technology becomes, the more indistinguishable it is from magic.”

Our dilemma is, we can only recognize and understand these earlier developments as we ourselves approach or reach the same stage of advancement today.

In light of this, a disturbing question is, how many out-of-place artifacts are still lost or remain unidentified in the basements of modern museums, because no one knows what they are, simply because we have not sufficiently progressed in our own technology to identify them?

At times we can point back to the ancient use of sophisticated machinery from the presence of the products that were left behind.

In 1999, physics researcher Peter J. Lu of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences began studying four ancient Chinese ceremonial stone axes excavated from the Sanzingcun and Liangzhu cultural sites near Zhejiang dating back between 4000 and 2500 B.C.E. What surprised Lu was that the axes were composed of forty percent corundum, the second hardest material known, yet they had extremely flat and smooth exteriors, and had been polished to a mirror-like luster.

This demonstrated that the Chinese had possessed advanced grinding and polishing techniques at least four millennia earlier than previously thought. The only substances we know today which could have acted in a limited manner as abrasives for corundum are diamond, alumina and quartz-based silica. Yet when Lu experimented by applying these various abrasives to portions of the ancient axes, he failed to produce anything like the superior smoothness observed on their original surfaces.

As Lu concluded, “It is absolutely remarkable that with the best polishing technologies available today, we cannot achieve a surface as flat and smooth as was produced more than five thousand years ago.”

Even earlier “out-of-place” stone cutting and polishing of Chinese jade had been employed in both Manchuria and southern Jiansu going back eight thousand years, far better than most diamond-polished examples from today. In the same regions and remote time period also have been found ancient earrings indicating the ability to precisely balance the weight of precious metals in matching sets with an intricacy we cannot match in modern times.

Evidence for age-old high-speed drilling has been discovered on the miniscule level of workmanship. In the last decade, Pakistani archaeologists unearthed from a site at Mehrgarth in what is now Baluchistan a number of Neolithic skeletal remains dating back eight millennia. On closer examination, the investigators found that several of the molars still attached in the jaws had been expertly drilled to remove cavities. Examination using an electron microscope revealed perfectly rounded holes that could only have been produced utilizing a powerful yet delicate drill with a grinding bit that outmatched most dentistry drill bits employed today. Medical technicians of the Univesity of Missouri at Columbia, who also examined the prehistoric teeth, marveled not only at the level of sophistication of the tools, but also at what knowledge of health and hygiene had to have been also present to successfully perform such an operation.

From the land of the Nile comes a myriad of examples of machine-perfect stone-cutting and polishing which demonstrates that the ancient Egyptians must have utilized a sophisticated technology from the very beginnings of their known history.

In 1883, Sir William Flinders Petrie, the leading Egyptologist of his time, published his definitive treatise, Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, in which he seriously questioned many of the assumptions his fellow colleagues were making concerning the craftsmanship of the earliest Egyptians. Petrie recognized that the primitive copper and bronze cutting tools still to be seen on exhibit in the Cairo Museum which conservative scholars point to as the instruments used to fashion stone in ancient Egypt would simply not work. No matter how much one attempted to harden copper and bronze by either hammering or fire-tempering, only with great difficulty will these metals barely cut through limestone or alabaster, and cannot even begin to scratch such materials as basalt, diorite or granite.

Yet time and again Petrie found nearly impossible examples of ancient stone-cutting skills. Extremely soft and brittle materials, such as rose quartz, schist, and poor grades of limestone and porphyry, had been somehow carved and polished to within cardboard thickness without cracking or flaking. On the other extreme, jars and vases made of diorite and granite, among the hardest substances known, were intricately carved and with neck openings too narrow to admit even the smallest hands.

Petrie discovered numerous examples of what he interpreted to be saw abrasion marks and circular lathe-tool marks on cut stone surfaces at ancient sites all along the Nile. At first he surmised hat the Egyptians must have utilized saw blades and circular saws with teeth made from either diamonds or corundum—the only materials Petrie was familiar with in his day which could successfully penetrate through basalt, diorite or granite. But he had to abandon his theory when he was forced to recognize the historic fact that diamond and corundum were unknown in ancient Egypt. He likewise found examples of stone-cutting and lathe marks which could only have been produced by at least two tons of pressure—an exertion which would have buckled most saw blades in the very first application.

Adding to the enigma, during the 1890’s Petrie began excavating at Naqada in Upper Egypt, and uncovered the remains of a Predynastic culture dating back before 4000 B.C.E. Yet even here, before the advent of historic Egypt, Petrie found more examples of machine-tooled stoneware, indicating that the lost technology of sophisticated stone-cutting dated back to a very remote period.

Beginning in 1984, Christopher Dunn, an American engineer and expert machinist, made several trips to Egypt, and in an updated confirmation of Petrie’s original research, found further uncontroversial evidence that the ancient craftspeople of the Nile Valley once possessed truly “out-of-place” methods and techniques for carving stone.

At Saqqara, in an area where the sacred Apis bulls were buried called the Serapeum, Dunn used state-of-the-art measuring instruments to inspect several of the stone sarcophagi. Each sarcophagus and its accompanying lid weigh several tons and were carved out of a single block of granite. Despite their tremendous size, however, Dunn determined that their interior surfaces were precisely square to within five one-hundred-thousandths of an inch, with corners perfectly square to within five thirty-seconds of an inch. This kind of accuracy over so large a surface area in such a hard stone cannot be matched by anything we could create by our technology today.

As Dunn concluded, just these artifacts by themselves “are the smoking gun that proves, without a shadow of a doubt, that a higher civilization than what we have been taught existed in ancient Egypt. The evidence is cut into the stone.”

In 1986, Dunn had the opportunity to similarly measure the Stone Box made from a single block of Aswan granite which is in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. Using the same type of sophisticated steel parallel gauge he had employed at Saqqara, he described his experience:

“I climbed into the box, and with a flashlight and the parallel was astounded to find the surface inside of the box perfectly smooth and perfectly flat. Placing the edge of the parallel against the surface, I lit my flashlight behind it. There was no light coming through the interface. No matter where I moved the parallel, vertically, horizontally, sliding it along as one would a gauge on a precision surface plate, I couldn’t detect any deviation from a perfectly flat surface. I became quite animated at this point, exclaiming into my tape recorder, ’Space-Age precision!’”

Some Egyptologists have tried to explain the ancient method of cutting Aswan granite with the use of some form of wire rubbed back and forth across the stone surface by hand. But this is a far cry from today’s methods employed in modern quarries whereby granite is cut utilizing spinning wire composed of silicon-carbide in conjunction with high-powered high-speed machinery. Even if we were to conjecture that the ancient craftspeople possessed such sophisticated materials and machines, it does not explain all of the enigmas surrounding the advanced nature of Egyptian stone-cutting.

In other investigations, Dunn found in a granite core from Aswan that the spiral lathe-cut sank to a depth of one-tenth of an inch over a six-inch circumference, or a rate of “ploughing“ of 1 in 60. Even by modern standards, this is an incredible feed-rate—the distance traveled per revolution of a drill. Dunn calculated that if the Egyptians had been only using a diamond-tipped drill, then it would have been five hundred times more efficient than the best mechanical drills we possess today.

He now believes that the Egyptians did have something better—an advanced form of cutting through stone using ultrasonics. The tell-tale embedded scrape marks and astounding feed-rates achieved was not the result of ordinary core drilling, but had to have been produced using high frequencies. Today’s ultrasonic drills have tool bits which vibrate at 19,000 to 25,000 cycles per second (hertz).

Aswan granite, which the ancient Egyptian craftspeople used quite extensively, contains large flecks of both quartz and feldspar. Yet, as Dunn observed, for some reason the cut grooves in many samples were deeper when they penetrated the quartz than they were when they sliced into the feldspar. This is most curious, because quartz is substantially harder than feldspar—one would have expected the quartz to have had shallower grooves if cut using only an abrasive slurry. And if only a diamond-tip had been employed, then the grooves should have been of equal depth for both materials. The only solution to this puzzle is if the Egyptians used a form of ultra-sound drilling that was harmonically attuned more to quartz than to feldspar. In a heterogeneous mixture as found in Aswan granite, the key to cutting it would be to match the vibration of the hardest substance contained, thus allowing the rock to be sliced more easily.

Equally surprising as the larger-scale stone cutting are examples found throughout Egypt of very intricate yet precise carving techniques. Diorite bowls dating to the Fourth Dynasty unearthed at Giza were incised with designs and inscriptions only one two-hundredth of an inch wide and one one-hundredth of an inch deep, with width and depth absolutely uniform throughout, and no signs whatsoever of splintered edges. No cold blade or jeweled-tip drill could have created such perfection. No modern laser would have worked either, without melting or cracking the stone. The only answer is that the Egyptians employed a maser—sound directed into an intense micro-beam which disintegrated and removed the stone on a very minuscule level. Today, our own civilization is just barely beginning to experiment with this process. Yet it would appear the ancient Egyptians already possessed such a technology and had been using it from an early period of their history, almost five thousand years ago.

Report Update—Alternative Views About the Saqqara Flywheel Answered

A group of conservative researchers who were part of a Petrie Museum excursion to Egypt in 2001, have attemped to offer their own alternative explanation of what they think the Saqqara flywheel really is. They have conveniently renamed the object as the “triple lobed schist bowl,” bypassing any of its technical implications. Building on an idea first proposed by English engineer William Kay, they believe that it was nothing more than a temple “tri-flame” lampstand for holding three sets of horizontal bundles of dried fibrous papyrus rushes that were burned either as a light source, or—wrapped with lotus, frankincense and myrrh—for producing incense smoke. Another possibility is that the three “lobes” each held a small pool of oil, and a cotton wick was set afire in the center of each pool to provide illumination.

In an attempt to prove their point, the researchers found elsewhere in the Cairo Museum the remains of an actual pole-supported oil lamp like what they have envisioned, unearthed from Deir el Medina that was once used in the Temple of Hathor and Maat as a Late Dynastic lighting source.

All these observations may seem to offer an answer to what the schist object really was, but there are a few problems. Let me answer this interpretation point for point.

First of all, when you go to the Museum and look at these two objects up close, it becomes clear that the Deir el Medina lampstand bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the Saqqara flywheel, not to mention the fact that they are separated by over two and a half millennia of time.

Second, if the flywheel was meant to serve as a holder of lit bundles for either light or incense, then its design was very poorly conceived and executed for such a purpose. Placed in a horizontal position, such bundles would burn up very fast and create a lot of ash residue which would have had to be removed and replaced constantly. It contrast, it would have been far more efficient to burn the bundles in a vertical position instead, which would make them last far longer and with far less ash as a consequence. There was no way that any type of bundle could be stood up in the schist “bowls” to have them work properly.

And if these “bowls” were instead filled with oil and ignited with slow-burning wicks, the shallowness of these receptacles would have necessitated their having to be continually refilled and the wicks re-lit in orderto the keep the flames going. Again, if these were supposed to have served as lamps, this was a very inefficient design for such a usage.

There is also the added problem that, if the flywheel had had anything burned inside its “bowls,” then there would have been tell-tale signs left behind of either deep-set carbonized marks or heat discoloration present on the schist surfaces. Yet no such evidence exists.

Over the past several years I have had numerous occasions in my many trips to Egypt of visiting the Cairo Museum, along with my tour groups. I have also been able to spend good amounts of time by myself personally examining the Saqqara flywheel up close. Not only is there no carbonization or discoloration anywhere on the object, but it also becomes obvious that—because the schist is so thinly carved and inherently brittle—a prolonged direct contact of heat from continuously burning fibers or from a slowly consumed wick would have seriously cracked and broken the stonework from the very outset. Yet no cracks or mendings due to breakage is apparent.

There is thus nothing to support the idea that the flywheel was ever intended to be utilized as a lamp or incense holder. In my own scrutiny of the schist piece, I am always overwhelmed every time I see it by its very sophisticated mechanical appearance. And for those many tour participants who have accompanied me to catch a glimpse of it—a number of whom have had scientific, physics and engineering backgrounds—they too have also recognized that here indeed is a not very subtle example of a piece of advanced technology from the past.

No matter how others may try to explain it away, the Saqqara flywheel still invokes an air of awe and mystery that remains largely unexplained to this day.

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]