The drill’s chemical composition was also surprising, study co-author Jiří Kmošek noted, as it is made up of an unusual copper alloy containing arsenic, nickel, lead, and silver.
A small copper tool excavated from a cemetery in Badari, Egypt a century ago has been identified by researchers as the oldest known rotary drill from ancient Egypt, according to an early February statement from Newcastle University.
The complete findings have been published in a study titled “The Earliest Metal Drill of Naqada IID Dating” in the journal Egypt and the Levant.
The drill has been dated by researchers from the university and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to the late 4th millennium BCE, before the first pharaohs unified Egypt under a single crown.
When it was first discovered and catalogued in the 1920s, the now-identified drill received the bare description of being “a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it.”
Since then, it has been stored at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology until researchers decided to further study the seemingly inconsequential artifact.
Bow drill in action, New Kingdom tomb painting from Western Thebes, Tomb of Rekhmire. (credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
When the tool was placed under a magnifying glass, the statement revealed that wear and tear consistent with drilling was discovered, including “fine striations, rounded edges, and a slight curvature at the working end, all features that point to rotary motion, not simple puncturing.”
The statement added that the attached remnants of leather may have been remnants of a bowstring used to power a bow drill, the “ancient equivalent of a hand drill.”
Badari drill predates known drill sets by 2,000 years
“The ancient Egyptians are famous for stone temples, painted tombs, and dazzling jewellery, but behind those achievements lay practical, everyday technologies that rarely survive in the archaeological record,” Dr. Martin Odler, a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University and co-author of the study, said of the find.
The tool, he argues, suggests that Egyptian craftspeople mastered reliable rotary drilling more than two millennia before the best-preserved drill sets previously known to archaeologists.
Bow drills appear in New Kingdom tomb paintings from roughly the middle to late second millennium BCE, showing craftsmen drilling beads and woodwork, the statement explained, adding that the Badari drill predates those examples by approximately 2,000 years.
The drill’s chemical composition was also surprising, study co-author Jiří Kmošek noted, as it is made up of an unusual copper alloy containing arsenic, nickel, lead, and silver.
The presence of silver and lead may hint at deliberate alloying choices and “wider networks of materials or know-how linking Egypt to the broader ancient eastern Mediterranean in the fourth millennium BCE,” according to Kmošek.
The study, which was completed as part of the UKRI-funded EgypToolWear project, highlighted the untapped potential of museum collections, the statement explained.
“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.”