PhysOrg reports on a very old tool – does it count as a power tool? At any rate, it was made in Egypt thousands of years ago, rediscovered in the 1920s and then, on re-examination now, re-rediscovered as a bow-powered drill:
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.
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.”
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You can read more of Odler’s research here, in Egypt and the Levant.