Posted on by maxfomitchev

The astonishing precision of ancient Egyptian stone vases motivated me to put forth a nuclear machining hypothesis, which I decided to test by measuring gamma spectra of two stone vases from Matt Beall’s collection using high-precision germanium spectroscopy. For this I set up a Canberra GC1018 germanium detector inside a massive 3,000 lbs lead shield – Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Canberra GC1018 germanium detector inside a lead shield.

I connected the detector to an MCA-PRO running PulseCounter Pro software. My plan was to capture gamma spectrum of the vases (Fig. 2) and then compare it to the gamma spectra of the corresponding ‘virgin’ rocks.

Fig. 2. Capturing gamma spectrum of a stone vase.

For this study I chose two exceptionally precisely made vases from Matt Beall’s collection: S1 (Fig. 3), which is made from the red Aswan granite, and V18 (Fig. 4), which is made of dolerite.

Fig. 3. The S1 vase made of red Aswan granite.
Fig. 4. The V18 vase made of dolerite.

For comparison I procured a sample of pink Egyptian granite (Fig. 5) and a dolerite rock (Fig. 6).

Fig. 5. A sample of pink Egyptian granite.
Fig. 6. A dolerite rock.

I calibrated my detector using 137Cs and 133Ba sources to make sure that the energy resolution was within 0.1 keV of the spec. Then I counted each vase and the corresponding granite and dolerite samples for 24 to 48 hours inside the lead shield in order to build a high quality spectrum.

The resulting spectra for the red granite vase S1 are shown on Fig. 8-9.

Fig. 8. The gamma spectra of the red granite vase S1 (blue) and the Egyptian pink granite sample (red).
Fig. 9. The zoomed-in gamma spectra of the red granite vase S1 (blue) and the Egyptian pink granite sample (red).

Both spectra are very similar and contain the same energy peaks, although of somewhat different height. The peaks correspond to natural radionuclides (e.g. U, Th, 40K, Bi, etc.) and nothing unusual immediately jumped at me.

The resulting spectra for the dolerite vase V18 are shown on Fig. 10-11.

Fig. 10. The gamma spectra of the dolerite vase V18 (blue) and the dolerite rock sample (red).
Fig. 11. The zoomed-in gamma spectra of the dolerite vase V18 (blue) and the dolerite rock sample (red).

Here I see that the vase has a broad peak around 60 keV, which is circled on Fig. 11. I find this interesting, and this observation merits further study, although this peak is likely to be from thorium (234Th).

Next Steps

A potentially fruitful avenue of research is on-site measurements of gamma spectra and surface composition analysis via XRF. These measurements can be taken with handheld gamma spectrometers and XRF analyzers. Are any of the archeological sights / artifacts exhibit anomalies consistent with the hypothesized nuclear machining? I say, let’s find out.

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