Scientist Reveals Ancient Predynastic Egyptian Pots to be of Advanced Precision
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Well, I'm back with a guest who's been on our radio program, Dr. Max Fominichev-Zamelov. How are you doing, sir? Good. Thanks for having me on your show. Now, for those who haven't heard from you or are new to your work, could you give us a little background on your work?

your work and your bio and who you are? Sure, yes. I have a master's and PhD in computer engineering. And for many years, I was a software engineer. And for 80 years, I taught software engineering at Penn State. So I was an associate professor at Penn State before I retired from the university to focus on my own company, Maximus Energy Corporation.

within which I manufacture my own radiation detection equipment that I sell to all major universities and to researchers worldwide for all sorts of nuclear experiments. And I'm free to pursue my own research, and that's what I've always wanted. My main research is on nuclear fusion. But every now and then I take on a tangent, and recently I took on a tangent studying

pre-dynastic Egyptian, ancient Egyptian stone vessels. Pre-dynastic, ancient Egyptian what vessels? Stone vessels. Stone vessels, okay. Yeah, the ones that look like this. Is that a real one? It's a real one, yes. How did you get hold of that? Well, I borrowed it from a collector named Matt Bell. You know Bell Supermarkets, right? Okay. Throughout Florida. So he owns about 80 of these vases. He collected them privately. And he was very curious to see...

you know what is so special about them because people have been speculating online most notably i got my inspiration from ben van kirkwick and his channel uncharted x where they have looked at a number of these vases and they've showed that they are incredibly precisely made in fact they're so well made that they argued they could have not been been made by hand in ancient times you know with uh known

flint, copper, and stick tools that archaeologists tell us the ancient Egyptians used. So I watched his videos and I got interested. So I don't remember how, but I got introduced to Matt Bell. And he said, oh, by the way, I have about 80 of these. And I scanned a bunch of them on a CAT scanner, you know, CAT scanner, the machines for, you know, that uses x-rays.

And the beauty of CAT scanner is it gives you like a three-dimensional scan. So it's not just outer surface. You get to see inside the object as well. And those scans were exported as STL 3D models. And because I'm a computer wizard or used to be a computer wizard. What's an STL 3D model? It's a standard 3D file format that anybody uses. So I imported those STL files in MATLAB and I wrote code to...

to do my own measurements because you know the first thing a scientist does you don't trust someone else's results right so you derive your own results so i took the 3d scans that matt bell shared with me and each skin of a vase you know like this i basically sliced horizontally and as you slice a round object horizontally you get circles

or something that looks like a circle. It's kind of like if you chop a sausage, you get this circular slices. So that's what I've done. On a computer, I sliced it horizontally because the vase was upright, got the circles, and I had to devise a quality metric. So when you look at how well something made, you need to come up with an objective criteria when you compare two pieces. And the criterion I chose is if you slice it, how round the slices are.

That's obvious, right? And then if there is a bunch of slices, it's how concentric they are. So a perfect object, let's say you have a perfect cylinder drawn in CAD. If you slice it, you get perfect circles that are perfectly axial. But if you made this cylinder yourself, your slices will not be too round and they will not be on the same axis.

So I took that and because these vases are hollow, they have outer and inner surfaces. So I did it for outer surface, for inner surface, and I also cross-referenced outer surface versus inner surface. Basically how well the vases hollowed out with respect to its shell. And lo and behold, out of the 22 objects in Matt Bell's collection, 11 were of very high precision according to this quality metric that I devised.

And to put things in perspective, I also bought like three vases of eBay. You know, you go to a gift shop in every museum, you can find a stone vessel that was made by some Pakistani or Bangladeshi, you know, basically in a sweatshop. But it was made on a lathe. You know, we're talking high quality objects that were made and using contemporary technology on a lathe.

But quickly, you know, they turned them out like 100 a day. So I got three of those. Those got scanned. And there were also two vases that were made in Russia, handmade by a lady whose name is Olga Vdovina. And she was associated or is associated with a project called Scientists Against Myths. It's a very popular, you know, ground roots project in Russia where people try to debunk various theories about pests.

So they said, OK, we're going to make a couple of these vases the way ancient Egyptians did. And she well documented it. So she used stone and stick and sand and flint. So she did emulate Egyptian technique. And they scanned a couple of the vases that she made. And I download those scans as well.

So we have 22 vases from Matt's collection, then three from gift shop, and two that were handmade. And I crunched the data for all of them and what are the results. So when I plot the results, the vases fall into two distinct categories. There is a category that's clearly consistent with handmade quality. So 11 vases in Matt Bell's collection. By the way, when you look at them, they look fine. You know, when you just eyeball them, you cannot tell it was handmade. It was that well made.

but the computer analysis doesn't lie. So the slices are not perfectly circular, they're not perfectly concentric, the outer surface is not perfectly aligned with the inner surface. So 11 vases were like that, and two of the vases that Olga made. So clearly, whatever Olga made with those stones were entirely consistent with manual labor and 11 vases from that collection. Well, the other 11 vases, however, were consistent with the vases made on a lathe.

So the three modern lathes is a tool where you turn something and you have a cutter. You know, it's a typical tool that's used for machining. So you have a chuck and your object is held in the chuck and then either chuck turns and you have a cutter or maybe chuck is static and your cutter is moving. But it's an actual machine where something is turning.

So the three modern vases were consistent with the other 11 vases from Bell's collection. But the most astonishing part was that he had several vases that were maybe like 10 times more precise than these modern gift shop vases. And to put things in numbers, the accuracy on one of his vases was two ten thousands of an inch, or basically 10 microns.

So imagine if you need to express something in microns, because, you know, thousands of an inch aren't cutting it because you're going into fractions. But it was basically round and concentric, you know, within 10 microns. And that just, you know, blew my mind because, you know, it's difficult to do that on a

How do we know the dating of these vessels though? Well, we know that's a good question. And then that's when I went into this project with Matt, he was open-minded enough to where he said, well, I'm a private collector. I bought this at an auction. And when you buy something at an auction, they give you a provenance.

Because, you know, these are in a major auction houses. It's not like, you know, you bought something off eBay. So he bought them, you know, from legitimate auction houses. And they typically give you a provenance document that describes, you know, provenance ownership and, you know, how this object was found. But I don't pretend to be an expert on that. So I cannot really critique provenance.

So therefore, the scientific conclusion that I pass, I say, if these objects are truly genuine, then ancient Egyptians didn't use sticks and stones to make them. They used some kind of machinery or some kind of advanced manufacturing techniques that are on par or better than contemporary machining. Or these objects are genuine fakes. I cannot really tell.

But the interesting thing is there are many of these objects in museums worldwide. Any museum you go, they have a bunch. So I heard a group of, you know, there is another gentleman called Adam Young. He's also a collector and he also one of these discoverers of this unparalleled precision.

So he went to Pietri Museum and he had his associate Caroli Pocca scan a few of these vases. I don't know what the results are. They haven't published them yet or disclosed them yet, but they submit and speculate that they will see the same level of accuracy as in these privately owned artifacts that they had scanned previously.

And some of those are scanning somebody else's vases or the same ones you have. No, they scan some of the museum vases. Different from your site?

Right. And that's what I mean. They look identical to yours or different? Very similar, you know, extremely similar. Can we see it again here for the audience to see on video? If you're on audio right now, this is, how would you describe this pattern? I don't, I don't, I'm not a potter. Well, I mean, this vase is unusual because it has these, you know, ridges on it, but typically it's just, you know, round surface. And what would they use this for? Nobody knows. They say it was an ointment jar. It was for spices. Who the heck knows?

But the interesting thing is there are hundreds of thousands of this. And the Pietri collected the biggest stash of them. Flinders Pietri is a British archaeologist. So Cairo Museum, British Museum, Chicago Institute of Art, Boston Museum, you know, UPenn, they all have them. And as I said, they seem to fall into two categories. I think there is this

Precise category that tends to be the oldest, and that's what is called pre-dynastic or early dynastic. And there is also a less precise category, which I dare say are Egyptian imitation. So meaning that I think that ancient Egyptians inherited this extremely precise artifacts maybe from an earlier civilization. And that's just a wild guess at this stage. And they were trying to emulate and make some of them themselves, which they clearly did. But there is a big difference in quality.

The older vessels and some of these older vessels are found like in Neolithic graves. Literally, I'm not making this up.

So imagine finding a vase like this in anolithic burial somewhere in Egypt, and that's what is called pre-dynastic. It was before Egypt became a kingdom. Has there been any dating techniques on this? Any idea of what precise range of dates? Well, they say it's about 4000 BC, the oldest of them go. So that one you're holding in your hands? Well, arguably. Arguably, it's 4000, you know, 4500 BC, you know. So that's 6,000 years old then. Right.

And I'm saying arguably because this is a private collection item, so it's hard to argue. How's it holding up so well? Because it's basalt. That's the thing, it's basalt. And I think they dropped it on the floor and it didn't break. It's real hard and real heavy. You dropped it on the floor? He did, yeah. And it didn't break. But on some of these, the walls are real thin. That's another mystery. How do you make something out of granite?

Yeah, and have a wall that's only a couple of millimeters thick. And in fact, they're so thin when you shine a flashlight, you can see through granite how thin that is. I know that they use basalt for magnetoculture in France for different agricultural purposes, for using magnetic fields.

Interesting. Yeah, but you know, one of the reasons here, Lint- I just wonder if it's magnetically active. Have you looked at it? I haven't yet, but I was looking in terms of whether it has any trace radioactivity. So the other two phases that I studied, I looked for trace radioactivity, I didn't find it, but I did put a couple of them into my electron microscopes. Can I see inside of it? Is there a plug-in in there? Yeah. Okay. It's hollowed out. Okay.

You're just staring into the abyss here. Let's put that right up on the camera. Can you put it closer? Folks, we are staring into the black void of our past.

Right. It's hollowed out amazingly well. The wall thickness is very uniform, and it's hollowed out, and you can see it's precisely centered. So it's very well made. It looks like those little vases that Winnie the Pooh used to store his honey in, you know? Pretty much, yeah. I mean, it's the same shape. You know, there is a great variety of them and great quantity, and most of them were found under the stepped pyramid of Djoser.

The Stepped Pyramid of Djoser. This is a pyramid in Egypt. That's the old school ones before the Great Pyramids, right? Yes. Well, so we think, right? Where tens of thousands of these were found. And to this day, there are hundreds of thousands of shards of these vases in that pyramid that people walk over.

There's just been so many of them that it's mind-blowing where they came from. You're not allowed to collect them and see if they compare to yours? Well, it's illegal. People do steal stars because you walk onto them, but technically it's illegal. Have you thought about speaking with the Egyptologists in Egypt and so forth and seeing if they could help you with some of this? I think the discussion is already happening without...

much of my participation because I sort of came in lately into it. And to give perspective, the original findings that these vases were precise were published maybe like two or three years ago. That's when a bunch of videos were made on YouTube. But I would submit that those findings weren't scientifically accurate because they were doing like spot analysis.

spot analysis and there wasn't comparison to modern artifacts and it wasn't comparison to handmade artifacts. So I think what I've done, I put it like on a scientific footing because I analyzed a large sample and I developed an automated technique that does everything for you without human intervention. So there is no like human factor involved. And I also compare it against handmade versus machine-made tools. So I have a baseline, what a handmade

object looks like and what a machine made object looks like. And that's what gives me ability to automatically classify this. But I think, you know, Dibble, he is the archaeologist who spat with Hancock at Joe Rogan's. Oh, yeah, the ones that had the dispute. Right. So he has a channel and he's been invited to a bunch of podcasts where he tried to pour cold water on these vases.

But I dare say that his argument was unsound. But he also didn't have my paper. So now, you know, when he gets a chance to read my paper, you know, if he hears to read it, he'll see that, you know, my analysis is not like hand-waving. It's based on data analysis. Have you shared this with folks like Graham Hancock?

No, I mean, I don't know them, so how would I share it with them? It sounds like you've been getting some attention about this. I'm curious if they reach out. Just a little bit. I mean, I've spoken to Matt Bell on his podcast called Limitless, and Uncharted just did a new episode, and they mentioned my work. So, you know, there is a little bit of discussion going on, and I submitted a paper to sign it. What's next for you on this project? Anything else you want to do? Yeah, I mean, I...

submitted a request to study some objects at Chicago Institute for the Arts. They have a museum with Egyptian collection and I submitted a request to study some of the objects at the Flinders Petri Museum. So if those requests get granted, I'll do my own scans and I scan the objects that I think should be scanned and I'll be able to present a result that spans not just in a private collection where the provenance is questionable, but if you go to a museum

Arguably, the question of provenance disappears because objects in museum collections tend to be better documented. It's better known how they were found, where they were found, and who collected them. So if I'm able to get a hold of museum pieces and scan them and also show that they fall into two categories, then we need to revisit how these objects were made. Because what my analysis shows, they were not made using hand tools.

What are some speculations as to other methods they could have used that would be not as exotic as some people's theories? Well, because I'm a nuclear scientist, I have a very exotic theory of my own. Because, you know, there's a joke. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? So because I'm a nuclear scientist, I'm thinking...

Let's go with Hancock and say there was an advanced civilization way back when. I don't know, aliens or Atlantis, and I don't really care. But what is clear to me is this civilization wouldn't have used the same machining techniques we're using. I think it's silly to think that someone far more advanced than we are was using the same laces and end mills.

So my speculation is whatever that advanced civilization was, they probably mastered nuclear technology. And as such, they use nuclear machining. And nuclear machining is not new. In fact, we use it in electron microscopes and in circuits manufacturing. There are ion beams. So you can etch, let's say, you can etch silicon with ion beams. You can strip layers of materials with ion beams.

But we cannot make an entire park using ion beams because we don't have the power yet. But if an advanced civilization mastered nuclear science to a greater degree than we have, so who is not to say that they couldn't get enough power to have a very powerful ion beam to strip off layers of material? So that's the hypothesis that I'm entertaining, and that's the hypothesis I'm looking at.

to examine when I look at the spots. So if I put it under an electron microscope or under some of the other spectrometers that I have in my laboratory, I should be able to see traces of this nuclear process. That's what I'm interested in, whether I find it or not, it's anybody's guess. But one thing we did not find when we looked at the spots, we didn't find any traces of copper.

So the common theory that these were made using copper or bronze tools and just doesn't hold water, according to my analysis, because I haven't found like a single copper atom on it. And I'm exaggerating a little bit. You know, there is a little bit of copper everywhere, everywhere, but I didn't find enough of it.

to show up on any of the spectra. And you'd expect if this was cut using copper tools, you'd expect to find some, but we didn't. We did find traces of other metals like iron and titanium, but not enough to be attributed to ablation from the end mill or from the bits of the instrument that was cutting.

And that's what made me think that maybe some other technique was used, maybe like nuclear machining, because these samples are remarkably clean. It doesn't look that clean, but the surface is very clean. When you put it under electron microscope, it's not contaminated. So how is this possible that it's not contaminated with anything? That's one of those things I...

I don't understand them. That's what makes it interesting to me. Is that beyond the standards of modern techniques? Well, I wouldn't say beyond. It's just unusual because...

I used electron microscope a lot. And every time you put a sample in it, you're supposed to wear gloves to where you don't contaminate it. With this, we didn't wear gloves. So these analysis isn't particularly well carried out, but we didn't see any other contaminations.

And any sample that I put from my lab, you know, even I try to maintain cleanliness and whatnot, I find like all sorts of stuff on it, but not on this sample. So I don't know, was it because they were made differently or because they were cleaned with sand or they were plasma etched or acoustically clean? I don't know. But those are the things that come to mind because sound cleans pretty well, plasma etching cleans pretty well.

So I could say, well, maybe these were made using acoustic technique, plasma technique. Or maybe they just sat in sand for so long to where sand just cleaned it completely and there is nothing left on it. Also a possibility. In one minute, what are the implications of this, if it bears out what you're saying? It's your hypothesis of what you're saying.

Right. So the people who started this project, they are trying to prove that another civilization existed way back when, kind of like Graham Hancock's thesis, because these weren't made using primitive tools.

And I would say, you know, this is obviously a far-fetching speculation that requires probably more than a pot to prove. But, you know, what I am willing to say scientifically that, you know, pots like this were not made using primitive tools the way, you know, mainstream archaeologists say they were made because the resulting quality is just inconsistent with handmade tools. And as such, the only conclusion that we can pass that either

You know, there were other tools available to ancient Egyptians that we're not aware of, you know, tools that are on par with modern machines. Or, you know, somebody else manufactured them in a way before Egyptians, and Egyptians just inherited them as heirlooms. And that would suggest that perhaps the Great Pyramids are older than the Step Pyramids. Yeah, perhaps. The Step Pyramids were like imitations of the original...

Right. Right. But, you know, this when I went down in one of those pyramids in Egypt, it smelled like cat urine. Really? Well, I'd like to go. Would you you know, when I was driving, I remember when I was driving through Cairo, I just remember a visceral feeling.

I looked at all the modern architecture and the apartment complexes were like Lego pieces constructed ad hoc, almost falling over. You know, it looks like the roof caving in and just swaths and swaths of people.

And then you see the city structures and modern architecture. And then when you continue, you see these things beaming out in the distance. And you're like, that's not the same. Right, right. You know, I don't know what it is, but that's not the same. There's no trajectory here that goes from that to this, unless there's been some kind of catastrophe or something. And it's backwards, right? So you have beautiful, precise buildings constructed in the past and modern hovels. Yeah.

Well, I appreciate your time and research here. Where can people go? You know, one thing before you give your website and everything that I'm going to have to pull you into is the Shroud of Turin research. You're going to get involved in that, I think. I think you can help us with that. Have you looked into that? Well, I heard it's mysterious. Yeah. So I'd be interested, yeah. Yeah.

Because that actually involves speculation by nuclear scientists of some type of nuclear radiation. I want to get your expert opinion on that. So let's, I'll bring in next time. I'll bring in a shroud of Turin guy and to talk and maybe we'll do a show on that. Get your thoughts on that or something. Very good.

Where can people find your work if they want to read your report and analysis? If you want to read my analysis, go to Maximus.Energy, which is my website. And then under my blog, you'll find a post that's called Astonishing Precision of Prodynastic Egyptian Stone Vessels. So it's on my website, Maximus.Energy, where you can read it. All right. We'll put that in the description of the show. Thank you for your time, and it's great talking to you. Thank you, David. Take care. Bye-bye.

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