5 Technical drawings at Dendera
One of the so-called
‘electron tubes’
Some extraordinary claims have been made about a number of reliefs carved on the walls of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt. It is alleged that Egyptologists are at a loss to explain them, while electrical engineers have been able to recognise them as Crooke’s tubes (an apparatus resembling the electron tubes found in televisions). Each “tube” contains a wavy serpent running the full length inside; attached to it is a braided line, which Alfred Bielek has identified with engineering illustrations used today for representing a bundle of wires. In some of the representations, the “tubes” each rest on a djed-pillar, identified by Bielek as a high-voltage insulator.
There are two major problems for the technological interpretation of these reliefs: the context of the temple’s construction and the texts that surround and describe the reliefs. The temple is full of inscriptions that enable us to date its construction to 54 BCE in the reign of Ptolemy XII. This places it firmly in one of the best recorded periods of ancient history and in the one country where documents detailing the minutiae of everyday life have survived. Not once do these documents talk about any technology that matches what Bielek sees in the reliefs.
The clinching part of the argument is what the texts describing the reliefs talk about. The supposed Crooke’s tube is mentioned in the texts describing the scene as a sun barge, the boat in which the sun god Ra‘ travelled across the sky. The form of the barge is in no way unusual. In many representations, the solar bark consists of a string like object with a bow and stern, while gods and objects connected with the sun or the sunrise stand on the horizontal platform. One of these objects, usually seen at the stern, is the lotus flower, which is what Bielek describes as the lamp socket. Understanding the conventions of Egyptian art is important to unravelling the ‘mystery’: they are not technical drawings, nor are they photorealistic depictions of the world. Instead, they are symbolic diagrams intended to be interpreted with the help of the bits of text that surround them. Superficial resemblances to twenty-first century technology have no relevance to their true meanings.
6 The ‘Asoka Pillar’ (‘Ashoka Pillar’ or ‘Pillar of Mehaurali’)
The Singh Stambh
An iron pillar near Delhi, India, is sometimes quoted as an out-of-place artefact, although it is not easy to see why. Set up in its present position by King Chandragupta II (c 376-415 CE), it stands a little over seven metres high with an average shaft diameter of 0.4 m and weighs about six tonnes; it is more properly known as Singh Stambh (‘Lion Pillar’). Most sceptics therefore claim that it is around 1600 years old, as opposed to the 4,000 years claimed, for instance, by Erich von Däniken. The mystery of the pillar consists of its largely uncorroded condition, despite standing exposed to the elements for at least 1,600 years. This has more to do with the purity of iron from which the pillar was made than with any unusual technology.
The story does get a little more complicated, though, because of confusion over the name of the pillar and the precise identity of the pillar for which the claims have been made. Emperor Asoka Vardhana (c 273-232 BCE) is known to have erected polished pillars throughout his kingdom, topped with regal lions that watched the four corners of his realm. The lions stand on a Buddhist wheel of life. These pillars are made from stone and the example in Delhi (at Firozshah Kotla, near Delhi Gate) was put in its present position by Firuz Shah (Sultan of Delhi 1290-1296 CE). The controversial ‘Asoka pillar’ in Delhi is not one of Emperor Asoka’s pillars but was transported from Meerut and installed close to where the Bara Hindu Rao Hospital now stands, near Delhi University, presumably by Chandragupta II.
The pillar in the
Qutb Minar mosque
It does get worse, of course. The photograph that is usually shown of the ‘Ashoka pillar’ is not of it at all, but is of an iron pillar in the Qutb Minar mosque near New Delhi. The mosque was built by Qutb al-Din following the first Islamic conquest of Delhi by Muhammad of Ghur in 1193 and located in the centre of the earlier twelfth-century Hindu fort of Rai Pithora. Standing in the courtyard of the mosque is an iron pillar 7.21 m high (although fringe writers quote its height as anything between 10 and 12 m), tapering from 0.41 m in diameter at its base to 0.32 m below the capital and weighing six tonnes; it bears an inscription to the same King Chandragupta II who erected the Singh Stambh and probably also dates from AD c 400. It is believed to have been brought in 1052 from Muttra by Anang Pal, a leader of the Rajput Tomaras.
As with the Singh Stambh, the pillar in the Qutb Minar has remained rust-free. Chemical analysis of the pillar has shown the iron from which it is composed to be low in sulphur and manganese; this purity is also believed to account for its uncorroded condition. The best ‘mystery’ that fringe writers can generate from these pillars is “[t]he possible use of some metallurgical secret ingredient or process… yet another reminder of ancient techniques being lost or forgotten”. Thin stuff indeed!