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Ancient Egypt Tools ... Stone Tools.A stone tool was one of the most basic of the ancient Egypt tools. It had a fairly limited scope and was mostly relegated to pounding, grinding or cutting. It was not easily shaped like it's primitive-tool cousin, wood, but it made up for it in toughness.
Wooden mallets were used for carpentry in ancient Egypt, but for serious pounding work, stone was the better choice. It's weight and hardness meant it had more impact. On the flip side, however, it's hardness also meant it could splinter. There was one type of rock that was super-tough though: Diorite. It was the best of the stone materials available in ancient Egypt to make hammer-stones that could shape tough rock such as granite.
Another advantage of stone over wood in the pre-metal days was the ability to make a sharp, cutting edge. The sickle was a hybrid of stone and wood that worked well for farming in ancient Egypt. The hook shaped blade was easily carved out of wood and small flint pieces with a sharp edge were embedded in it. There were limitations to the flint blades also. Their brittleness meant that they were subject to splintering and breaking. This dictated the engineering of bladed stone tools and they were made mostly without any real handle. The handle was basically the blunt end of the stone wrapped in cord and cloth for gripping.
The title of oldest profession has been used for other forms of employment that we won't go into here. But when it comes to tool making there wouldn't be any older than the knapper. A trade that goes back before ancient Egypt. Back to when man first started to hit two stones together to see what would happen. When flint was hit with another, harder, stone on its edge it would flake off. By working at it and flaking it off on both sides, an edge could be formed. The very first chopping and cutting tools were invented this way. Knappers in ancient Egypt had probably just refined this artful pre-historic trade. When bronze came along however, the quality of knapping declined as it became a task that labourers or the poorer and lesser skilled performed. Expert craftsmen using ancient Egypt tools moved away from stone because it did not offer the same possibilities that metals did.
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