one to
be engraved. If a very hard stone, the incising or cutting was done by
drilling, wearing and polishing, through attrition, by means of a
wooden or metal point, kept in connection with a silicious sand or
corundum, by the medium of oil or water; and also, by the use of the
punch and of the wheel. The Greek artists likely used powdered emery
and copper drills. Bronze and iron drills, and those of other metals
may have been used at a very early period. Pliny says, corundum was
used in the form of a splinter fixed in an iron style. The ancients
also appear at a very early period, to have used diamond dust and oil,
and diamond splinters, framed in iron.

It has been shown by recent investigations, that the Ancient
Egyptians, before the building of the Great Pyramid; cut diorite,
syenite and other very hard stone, by means of saws, some of them nine
feet long, having jeweled teeth inserted; and that they excavated the
centre of large blocks of hard stones for use as sarcophagi, etc., by
means of tubular or circular hollow drills, the cutting surface of
which was armed with jewels. They then took out the core and broke
down the partitions between the drilled holes, with the chisel and
hammer, and thus made large excavations in the block of hard stone.
They also used lathes at a most archaic period in cutting diorite and
other hard stones.[24] They also used the bow-drill,[25] They also may
have known and used boort.

As early as the first Theban Dynasty, the XIIth Egyptian (2466-2266
B.C.,) the Dynasty in which lived the Amen-em-hats and the Usertsens,
the great early art period of the Egyptian empire,[26] the Egyptians
engraved on amethyst, jasper and rock crystal, and at that early
period did some of the most beautiful work remaining to us of their
glyptography. The signets however were not always in scarab form, they
were sometimes squares or parallelograms.[27]

There is now in the Museum of the Louvre in Paris, France, the finest
old cameo in the world. It is of the reign of Amen-em-hat IIIrd of the
XIIth Dynasty, (2300 B.C.) This was the first Theban Dynasty and is a
very rare period for Egyptian cameo work, as they then usually
incised their engraving on precious stones and did not engrave them in
relief.[28] The stone is a square sardonyx and is engraved in relief,
with great fineness on one side, with a figure the name of which can
be read _Ha-ro-bes_, the other side is incised and has the figure of a
phara