cladking Wrote:
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> How can we possibly believe that they would spend
> hundreds or thousands of hours hollowing out a jug
> from stone when the same shape could be made of
> wood or soft stone with little effort? If they
> could drill jars easily enough to make their
> production economical then surely they had simpler
> means of working the large pieces of granite as
> well.

Have you ever sculpted in stone? I've done some work on limestone, and I've even handpolished some granite. At one time I did some lapping and cabbing because we ran a little jewelry business out of our house.

You should try it sometime... water and sand grit on granite. Place a granite grinder on top, wet, add sand, and rub away. It goes a lot faster than you seem to believe it did.


> And we always come back to the question of why.
> Why would they develope technology that had no
> use?

Polishing granite? They did lots of it. Egypt is full of it.

> Sure, a craftsman is always going to make
> something as fine as possible but what drove the
> culture to work stone like this?

It holds water, it doesn't melt in the rain, it is rarer than limestone, its hardness means that not everyone can have it, it has pretty sparkly stuff in it (I'm not being facetious here; granite has pegmatites in it), it's polished finish is much nicer looking than limestone's... and so on and so forth.

Again...just because YOU find no reason in it doesn't mean that they found no reason in it.