Carpenter making a chair with bow drills, Tomb of Rekhmire, c. 1479–1400 BC, Nina de Garis Davies (1881–1965)
5,300-year-old metallic object may be the oldest known rotary drill — and anticipates pre-Pharaonic technology.
A small metallic object, discovered almost a century ago in a cemetery in Upper Egypt, was recently reinterpreted as the oldest rotary drill ever identified in an Egyptian archaeological context.
The small piece, less than 64 millimeters in diameter and less than two grams in weight, would have been produced at the end of the 4th millennium BC, during the Predynastic Egypt period, that is, long before the reign of the first pharaohs.
The reevaluation of the artifact was presented in a study, in the magazine Egypt and the Levant, which is written by a team of archaeologists from the University of Newcastle, in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The authors, cited by , classify the object as a “mechanically sophisticated” drilling tool for the time and argue that the same object demonstrates the dominance of a stable and controlled rotary drilling technology in very early stages of Egyptian history.
Old photograph of the artefact (left), published in 1927 by Guy Brunton, next to the original artefact (right)
A reinterpretation of object function
The find comes from the burial of a man identified as “Grave 3932”first documented in the 1920s. At that time, the object was described somewhat conclusively as a small copper awl with a wrapped leather strip.
Now, the team argues that observation under magnification revealed signs of use compatible with rotary movements: rounded edges from wear, striations and other micro-features associated with repeated friction. All patterns comparable to those observed in drilling devices from later Egyptian periods.
The element that reinforces the functional reading of the artifact is, precisely, the trace of leather marked in ancient records. According to the researchers, there are six turns of a very fragile leather string, interpreted as part of a “bowstring” — the central component of a bow drill. This type of tool works with a string wound around an axis: when moving the bow back and forth, the string quickly rotates the axis and, with it, the piercing tip.
X-ray fluorescence tests indicated an unusual alloy, with copper, arsenic and nickel, and additional signs of silver and lead deposits. The authors interpret this combination as potentially deliberate, as it could produce a metal that is harder and more visually distinct from common copper, which would be an advantage for a tip subject to constant friction.
The study admits that the composition may point to long distance exchange networksor to still little explored ore sources in the Eastern Desert. In either case, the tool becomes an indirect indicator of metallurgical knowledge and circulation of materials (or techniques) in the eastern Mediterranean and ancient Near East during the 4th millennium BC
The authors also emphasize that confirmation of a bow drill in this period is unprecedented for Egyptology: Although the instrument is well documented in later times, the unequivocal association with a predynastic context anticipates some of the best-preserved drill collections by more than two millennia.
