ABSTRACT
The technology for hollowing stone vessels was fully established in the Predynastic period. During the Badarian and Nagada I periods, hard stone vessels were necessarily, and laboriously, hollowed with hand-held stone borers, used in conjunction with desert sand abrasive; in these periods, hand-held flint borers were probably in use for very soft stone (e.g. gypsum), without sand abrasive. G. Caton-Thompson and E.W. Gardner1 found crescent-shaped chert tools (1⁄4 to 3⁄4 crescents) that were used to bore out the interiors of the gypsum vessels at an Old Kingdom workshop at Umm-es-Sawan in the Fayum (Figure 5.1, left); the crescents were frequently found caked in gypsum.
