https://phys.org/news/2026-02-year-drill-rewrites-story-ancient.html

February 9, 2026

5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools

by Newcastle University

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan

Original photograph of the artefact published in 1927 by Guy Brunton (left) and the actual artefact. Credit: Martin Odler

A new study reveals that Egyptians were using a mechanically sophisticated drilling tool far earlier than previously suggested. Researchers at Newcastle University, and the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, have re-examined a small copper-alloy object excavated a century ago from a cemetery at Badari in Upper Egypt, and concluded it is the earliest identified rotary metal drill from ancient Egypt, dating to the Predynastic period (late 4th millennium BCE), before the first pharaohs ruled. The study is published in Egypt and the Levant.

The artifact (cataloged as 1924.948 A in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge) was found in Grave 3932, the burial of an adult man. When first published in the 1920s, the artifact—which is only 63 millimeters long and weighs about 1.5 grams—was described as "a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it." That brief note proved easy to overlook, and the object attracted little attention for decades.

However, under magnification, the researchers found that the tool shows distinctive wear consistent with drilling: fine striations, rounded edges, and a slight curvature at the working end, all features that point to rotary motion, not simple puncturing.

Bow drill in action, New Kingdom tomb painting from Western Thebes, Tomb of Rekhmire, object 31.6.25. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain

The research, which is published in the journal Egypt and the Levant, also described six coils of an extremely fragile leather thong, which the researchers argue is a remnant of the bowstring used to power a bow drill, an ancient equivalent of a hand drill, where a string wrapped around a shaft is moved back and forth by a bow to spin the drill rapidly.

Dr. Martin Odler, Visiting Fellow in Newcastle University's School of History, Classics and Archaeology and lead author, explains, "The ancient Egyptians are famous for stone temples, painted tombs, and dazzling jewelry, but behind those achievements lay practical, everyday technologies that rarely survive in the archaeological record. One of the most important was the drill: a tool used to pierce wood, stone, and beads, enabling everything from furniture-making to ornament production.

"This re-analysis has provided strong evidence that this object was used as a bow drill—which would have produced a faster, more controlled drilling action than simply pushing or twisting an awl-like tool by hand. This suggests that Egyptian craftspeople mastered reliable rotary drilling more than two millennia before some of the best-preserved drill sets."

Bow drills are well known from later periods of Egyptian history, including surviving New Kingdom examples from the middle to late second millennium BCE, with tomb scenes showing craftsmen drilling beads and woodwork in the tombs located in the modern-day West Bank of Luxor area.

Chemical analysis by the team, using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), found the drill was made from an unusual copper alloy. Co-author Jiří Kmošek explains, "The drill contains arsenic and nickel, with notable amounts of lead and silver. Such a recipe would have produced a harder, and visually distinctive, metal compared with standard copper. The presence of silver and lead may hint at deliberate alloying choices and, potentially, wider networks of materials or know-how linking Egypt to the broader ancient Eastern Mediterranean in the fourth millennium BCE."

The study, which is linked to the EgypToolWear project, also highlights how museum collections can still provide major discoveries. A small object, excavated long ago and described in a single line, turns out to preserve not only early metalworking but also a rare trace of organic material, evidence for how the tool was actually used.

More information

The Earliest Metal Drill of Naqada IID Dating, Egypt and the Levant (2026) DOI: 10.1553/AEundL35s289. www.austriaca.at/?arp=0x0041300e

Provided by Newcastle University

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Rebuilding the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Block by Virtual Block - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/science/archaeology-lighthouse-alexandria.html

Rebuilding the Lighthouse of Alexandria, Block by Virtual Block

An ancient skyscraper considered the seventh wonder of the world crumbled to ruin centuries ago. Now an ambitious archaeological project aims to reassemble it in 3-D.

A 19th-century engraved depiction of the Pharos of Alexandria.Credit...Florilegius/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

By Franz Lidz

Feb. 6, 2026

Towering over Alexandria, the vibrant Mediterranean port and capital of Ptolemaic Egypt, an enormous lighthouse was a symbol of the ambition of the Hellenistic age, a 460-foot skyscraper of granite and limestone that Gregory of Tours, a sixth-century A.D. Gallic bishop, deemed the seventh wonder of the ancient world. Its powerful beam was a nightly promise of safety for mariners approaching the treacherous coastline, and the structure was second in height only to the Great Pyramid of Giza, commonly accepted as the first wonder of the world and the only one that survives.

For nearly 1,600 years, the lighthouse, known as the Pharos of Alexandria, stood on an island at the entrance to the city's eastern harbor as a sentinel defiant against time and nature, shrugging off dozens of earthquakes. But even monumental ingenuity has its limits; in A.D. 1303, a doozy of a tremor caused a tsunami so intense that it left the structure in shambles. Another quake, 20 years later, brought the rest crashing down, a tumble of statues and masonry eventually swallowed by the ever-rising sea.

"The architectural fragments lie scattered over 18 acres underwater," said Isabelle Hairy, an archaeologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in France and the Center for Alexandrian Studies in Egypt. "The visibility is extremely bad, the seabed is uneven and there are no clear layers of sediment."

For the last four years, Dr. Hairy has led the Pharos Project, guiding an elite squad of historians, numismatists, architects and graphics programmers to reconstruct the ancient lighthouse as a comprehensive digital twin. Having so far analyzed roughly 5,000 blocks and artifacts on the sea bottom, the team is reverse-engineering the ancient structure from its 14th-century collapse.

This ambitious fusion of antiquity and innovation relies on photogrammetry, which stitches together thousands of two-dimensional images to create precise three-dimensional models, effectively assembling a colossal archaeological puzzle piece by virtual piece.

"The project has enduring importance and interest globally, both for the underwater archaeology aspect and for the nature of the finds — including the 80-ton blocks," said Paul Cartledge, a historian of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge who is not connected to the operation. "Try dredging those by hand. Not recommended."

A projection of power

A sixth-century Libyan Byzantine mosaic showing the lighthouse; a portion of a mosaic in the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice, dated around 1200, depicting the arrival of St. Mark in Alexandria.Credit...Charles O. Cecil, via Alamy; Zev Radovan, via Alamy

The story of the Pharos began with a general's loyalty to a fallen king. After Alexander the Great, a ruler of Macedonia and its vast empire, died suddenly in 323 B.C., his boyhood companion Ptolemy took control of Egypt as its governor. In 305 B.C., he appointed himself pharaoh, Ptolemy I Soter (the Savior).

To transform the city into the center of the cult of Alexander the man-god, Ptolemy commissioned a monumental lighthouse. In the book "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World," Bettany Hughes, an English historian, writes, "The Pharos had a double purpose: both practical — its role as a lighthouse — and ideological, as an emblem of association with Alexander and his one-world vision."

While Ptolemy I probably lived to see the first stones laid near the time of his own death, around 282 B.C., it was his son and successor, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who saw the project through. Construction took 15 years and coincided with a whirlwind of palace intrigue, as the slightly distracted Ptolemy II exiled his first wife and co-ruler, Arsinoe I, and married his sister, Arsinoe II. Architecture takes time; family drama takes precedence.

Despite limited physical evidence and clashing historical accounts, scholars generally agree that the Pharos was a majestic three-tiered tower resembling a wedding cake. The square base, sprawling over 1,115 feet, served as a fortified hub for fuel and livestock, housing a garrison and apparatuses for lifting food and supplies.

Rising from its immense foundation, the structure narrowed into a graceful, eight-sided marvel punctured by open windows and crisscrossed by internal spiral stairs. This octagonal heart, stretching nearly 200 feet into the sky, was the work of Sostratus of Cnidus, a visionary Greek builder from what is now southwestern Turkey. By shaping the second story as an octagon, he honored the eight winds of the sea.

The signaling lantern burned in the crowning, circular tier, probably in an open-air setup exposed to the Mediterranean winds rather than encased in glass. Above it all, a grand 50-foot statue of a god, widely believed to be Zeus, watched over the port. Some authorities interpret this top section differently: Perhaps it was a fourth, subdivided layer that housed the beacon and statue pedestal separately.

Image

The reverse of a second-century coin depicting the lighthouse; the front side shows the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius.Credit...Zev Radovan, via Alamy

More than just a functional navigational aid, the Pharos stood as a dazzling projection of Ptolemaic power, engineered to be seen for some 37 miles across the Mediterranean. This intense light is believed to have been achieved through a sophisticated combination of roaring fires — most likely fueled by oil, given Egypt's sparse timber resources — and beaten-copper mirrors designed to focus the beam.

Andrew Michael Chugg, an independent historian and author of "The Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria," has proposed that the light was produced by an oil lamp inside a largely transparent glass sphere. Such a device, he argued, probably would have been open at the top, allowing it to function like a contemporary hurricane lantern, protecting the flame while enhancing its brightness and direction.

So bright was the lighthouse's watch fire, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder observed, that it risked being "mistaken for a star."

Resurfacing relics

Reduced to a shell by the 1323 earthquake, the lighthouse lay neglected until 1480, when Sultan Qaitbay repurposed its ruins to build a citadel that still guards the shore. The lighthouse found a second life in this fortress, but much of ancient Alexandria — including the royal palace and Alexander the Great's tomb — sank beneath the waves as a result of geological shifts.

Hints of this sunken kingdom surfaced in 1916 when reports of underwater statues began to emerge. Following a brief UNESCO scouting mission in 1968, the site was finally brought to light in 1994 through the mapping efforts of the French archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur and his team from the Center for Alexandrian Studies.

Eighty-five feet down, divers discovered a stunning trove of artifacts, including 30 sphinxes, a 70-ton door frame, another door frame 16 feet high and a half-dozen elegant columns from the reign of Ramses II in the 13th century B.C.

The most striking find was a gigantic statue, almost certainly of a pharaoh, similar to one of a queen in the guise of Isis that the Egyptian Navy had raised in 1961. It is now believed that the pair represent Ptolemy I and his wife, Berenice I. "Given the fluid nature of identification and association between divine heroes and humans," Dr. Hughes wrote, "most likely these Pharos sculptures were an alchemy of both royal rulers and mythological beings."

Image

The Qaitbay Citadel, in present day, on Pharos Island, the site of the ancient lighthouse.Credit...Suzuki Kaku, via Alamy

Last summer, working with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the team used a barge-mounted, high-capacity crane to hoist 22 granite blocks, some weighing up to 80 tons, from the seafloor.

The operation recovered more than 100 submerged relics, including lintels, foundational paving stones, lead clamps and uprights from the gargantuan entrance. Notably, the haul included remnants of a previously unrecorded pylon, featuring a doorway that seamlessly blended Egyptian stylistic elements with Greek construction know-how.

Once safely brought to the surface, these colossal components underwent high-resolution scanning by engineers from La Fondation Dassault Systèmes, which documented and virtually repositioned them to reimagine the Pharos's lost design without putting the original stone at risk. After the blocks were measured, they were returned to the sea for long-term preservation.

A new view on old assumptions

Many experts remarked that the Pharos Project had significantly advanced the modern understanding of the lighthouse by moving from speculative sketches to empirical, physical analysis.

Among other insights, the recovery has revealed that the structure was assembled using advanced interlocking techniques rather than relying solely on mortar. "The clamps help explain how such a massive structure was erected in such a short time," Dr. Hairy said.

The finds confirm that large blocks of local limestone were used for the core and granite for the structural doorway, which helped the building withstand centuries of environmental stress. The jambs and lintels have allowed researchers to map the precise entrance of the lighthouse, changing previous assumptions about its scale.

Among other surprises, the research indicated that the eastern harbor's relative sea level — the height of the Mediterranean compared to the land nearby — has risen as much as 26 feet since the Pharos was erected in the third century B.C.

Dr. Hairy estimated that the Pharos Project was still generations from completion, hampered by minimal state funding and worsening pollution. As garbage and rising silt cloud the water, stalling photogrammetry and recovery, future missions must revert to basic lifting, using heavy-duty inflatable bags to raise submerged blocks.

But the mission has already defied expectations. According to Dr. Cartledge, the team has proved the unthinkable: The lighthouse truly was as prodigious as ancient chronicles claimed, outlasting the skeptics who long dismissed those accounts as mere Ptolemaic flattery.

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ASOR Zoom Webinar: Rodin and the Art of Ancient Egypt

 

Don't miss the next FOA webinar, "'An elegance of spirit adorns all its works.': Auguste Rodin and the Art of Ancient Egypt," presented by Carl Walsh on Wednesday, February 18th at 7:00 PM ET. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. Most people would not conceive of any connection between the works of the master French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and the art of ancient Egypt. The two certainly present radically different bodily aesthetics, divorced by vast temporal and cultural contexts. How then, can we see them as meaningfully related? This is one of the key questions framing the current exhibition Rodin's Egypt, now on display at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, in collaboration with the Musée Rodin in Paris, until March 15, 2026. In this talk, Dr. Walsh will discuss how Rodin became interested in ancient Egyptian art in his waning years and the profound—if subtle—impact it had on the sculptor's practice through the objects which you can see in the exhibition.  Friends of ASOR has now run five seasons of our FOA Webinar Series, and last season was entirely free and open to the public thanks to our generous donors and sponsors! This season, our goal is to raise $10,000 to ensure all webinars can once again be free. If you have enjoyed one or more webinar(s) this season, please consider a gift of any amount so we can continue to provide membership scholarships and these webinars for free in the 2025-2026 season. Designate your gift for "Webinars" in the drop-down menu.

ASOR The James F. Strange Center 209 Commerce Street Alexandria, VA 22314 Email | (703) 789-9229 | Website | Unsubscribe

3,500-Year-Old Ancient Fragrances Reveal What Egyptian Mummification Smelled Like | Discover Magazine

https://www.discovermagazine.com/3-500-year-old-ancient-fragrances-reveal-what-egyptian-mummification-smelled-like-48652

3,500-Year-Old Ancient Fragrances Reveal What Egyptian Mummification Smelled Like

Learn how traces on Egyptian mummification jars were used to make perfume, bringing ancient fragrances and societies back to life.

Written by Jenny Lehmann

Feb 5, 2026, 3:10 PM | 3 min read

Museum display for Ancient Egypt in Denmark's exhibition for the Scent of the Afterlife.(Image Credit: Ehrich SC, Calvez C, Loeben CE, Dubiel U, Terp Laursen S and Huber B (2026) Archaeol. 4:1736875/CC BY)

Sometimes all it takes is a little whiff to take us back into our past: the scent of our grandparents' detergent or the smell of our childhood home can induce surprisingly strong emotions. Researchers long assumed the scents of ancient worlds wouldn't stand the test of time, but reviving them could help us better relate to and engage with societies of the past. An interdisciplinary research team of archaeologists, chemists, and a perfumer did exactly that.

For their project Scent of the Afterlife, they developed a way to convert biochemical traces sampled from embalming jars of ancient Egypt into fragrances suitable for museum exhibitions. Summarized in a paper published in Frontiers, the team hopes to provide methods for museums that expand how visitors can engage with the past using their senses.

"This research represents a significant shift in how scientific results can be shared beyond academic publications," explained archaeo-chemist Barbara Huber from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Tübingen in a press release.

Museum visitors smelling the Scent of the Afterlife card.

(Image Credt: Ehrich SC, Calvez C, Loeben CE, Dubiel U, Terp Laursen S and Huber B (2026) Archaeol. 4:1736875/CC BY)

Reviving Ancient Fragrances for Museums

Microscopic traces of DNA, proteins, and fats on artifacts can offer little clues about the past. Recently, the attention of biomolecular archaeology has expanded to include other molecular traces — chemicals that evaporate from solids and float in the surrounding air — such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Experts previously ignored these compounds because they didn't expect them to survive. Advances in technology can now identify aromatic fingerprints from ancient objects like incense, perfumes, resins, and medicine, giving us the opportunity to explore ancient rituals and daily life like never before.

Archaeologists, chemists, curators, a perfumer, and an olfactory heritage consultant worked collaboratively to translate the biochemical signatures of 3,500-year-old Egyptian canopic jars into an authentic fragrance that can be used in museums and other public outreach facilities.

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Egyptian Mummification Scent Takes Visitors Back in Time

Creating a compelling fragrance requires more than identifying chemical compounds in a sample.

"The real challenge lies in imagining the scent as a whole," explained perfumer Carole Calvez, who developed a series of formulations. "Biomolecular data provide essential clues, but the perfumer must translate chemical information into a complete and coherent olfactory experience that evokes the complexity of the original material, rather than just its individual components."

The result was the creation of the Scent of the Afterlife in two different formats suitable for public settings. One is a portable scented card handed out to visitors, and the other is a fixed scent diffuser within the exhibition.

Feedback from visitors to the August Kestner Museum in Hanover, Germany — home to the artifacts sampled for the project — was positive. They reported that the integration of scent made them feel immersed in ancient Egypt, with the cards becoming a key part of the museum's guided tours.

"Scent provides a new approach to mummification, moving away from the scare factor and horror movie clichés toward an appreciation of the motivations behind the actions and the desired results," said curators Christian Loeben and Ulrike Dubiel in the statement.

Creating Multisensory Museum Experiences

The Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, installed the fixed scent station as part of their Ancient Egypt – Obsessed with Life exhibition, drawing immediate attention.

"The scent station transformed how visitors understood embalming," said curator Steffen Terp Laursen in the releaase. "Smell added an emotional and sensory depth that text labels alone could never provide."

This collaborative project shows how combining different disciplines can create innovative ways to bring the past back to life by engaging a multitude of our senses.

"We hope to offer museums compelling new tools for bringing visitors closer to past environments and practices via sensory interpretation and engagement," said olfactory consultant Sofia Collette Ehrich in the release.

Besides increasing visitor interest and engagement, similar projects can help us understand ancient perfume-making, healing, sanitation, and cosmetic practices in more detail, and with them, past societies themselves.

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

• This article references information from a recent study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology: From biomolecular traces to multisensory experiences: bringing scent reproductions to museums and cultural heritage

Meet the Author

• 

  Jenny Lehmann

  Jenny Lehmann is an Associate Editor at Discover Magazine who writes articles on microbiology, psychology, neurology, and zoology, and oversees the Piece of Mind column of the print issue.View Full Profile

Related Topics

• archaeology
• behavior & society
• chemistry

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Northern Cal. Egyptology Lecture Feb. 22: Provenance Research in the Fight Against Looting

The American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California chapter, and the UC Berkeley Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures invite you to attend a Zoom lecture by Sara Aly, Griffith Institute: Provenance Research in the Fight Against Looting Sunday, February 22 2026, 3 PM PST Register in advance for this lecture: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/MvauTi1wT0OHniyDLJXJHw After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the lecture. There are a few things you should know before you join the lecture: * Advance registration is required. When you click on the link to "Register in advance for this lecture" you will receive instructions by email on how and when to join, along with a link on which you will click to join the meeting. Save the email, as you will need the link it contains to join the meeting. Please register now. Please do not share the join link with anyone, it is unique to your email address. Try to join at least 10 minutes before the meeting. When you do join the meeting, be prepared to be put in the waiting room until the lecture starts at 3 pm.  This is a security measure. * If you haven't already installed Zoom, you should download and install the Zoom program (app) well before you try to join the meeting. There IS an option to use your web browser to join the meeting instead of the Zoom program, but the browser interface is limited and depends greatly on what browser and what operating system you're using. * For tutorials on how to use Zoom, go to https://learn-zoom.us/show-me. In particular, "Joining a Zoom Meeting" should show you what you need to do to join our lecture. * All meeting attendees can communicate with everyone, or with individual participants, using the chat window, which can be opened by clicking on the chat button and which you can probably find at the bottom middle of your Zoom viewing screen. Participants will be encouraged to hold their questions for the speaker until after the lecture, and will also be encouraged to address their questions for the speaker to everyone, not just to the speaker, so that all can see them. "Everyone" is the default chat option. If you have any questions, please email glenn@glennmeyer.net or arcencZoom@gmail.com. About the Lecture: Since the days when the pharaohs ruled over Egypt, funerary materials have been affected by the greed of people. An enormous amount of wealth was invested in preparations for the afterlife, but often this richness represented by gold and precious minerals in the funerary equipment became the booty of many, rather than the resting place for one. Unfortunately, the scale of destruction due to the ongoing looting is greater today than ever and several illegally sourced artefacts from Egypt constantly appear on the art market. Authorities consistently work to detect these objects by tracing the activity of dealers and galleries, but a lot still needs to be done. Source countries require tougher laws and international legislation needs to become stricter. Moreover, the knowledge of specialists must be employed in a systematic way to assist in the rescue of these objects. Museum curators should implement due diligence, learn about the art market, and understand how to conduct provenance research. This practice helps with the identification of looted artefacts by analysing an object and comparing it with published examples of the same kind, allowing its origins to be identified and some lost archaeological context to be recovered.   About the Speaker: Sara Aly's research focuses on the circulation of illicitly sourced Egyptian artefacts on the art market, following a collaboration that started 6 years ago with the Circulating Artefacts project at the British Museum. Her MA dissertation at the University of Manchester (2023) examined upper coffin fragments appearing on the art market. Since 2023, she has been a member of the Franco-Egyptian Archaeological Mission of Western Thebes, working at the Ramesseum, where she analyses coffin and cartonnage fragments. From 2023 to 2025 she worked as an Art Market Expert at the British Museum helping to identify and recover missing items from the museum's collection. Now based at the Griffith Institute, Sara is studying the archival material of J.J. Clère related to his documentation of Egyptian objects in the possession of antiquities dealers and collectors between the 1930s and the 1980s. About Northern California ARCE: For more information, please visit https://www.youtube.com/@NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://www.facebook.com/NorthernCaliforniaARCE, https://arce-nc.org, https://bsky.app/profile/khentiamentiu.bsky.social, and https://khentiamentiu.org. To join the chapter or renew your membership, please go to https://arce.org/membership/ and select "Berkeley, CA" as your chapter when you sign up.