Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/40

i8 General History of Europe excellent tools of all sorts. 1 The tool which demanded the greatest skill was the long, flat ripsaw, which the smith knew how to hammer into shape out of a broad strip of copper some- times five or six feet long. Such a saw may be seen in use in the accompanying cut. On the same wall we find the lapidary holding up for the noble's admiration splendid stone bowls cut from diorite. Al- though this kind of stone is as hard as steel, the bowl is ground CABINETMAKERS IN THE PYRAMID AGE At the left a man is cutting with a chisel, which he taps with a mallet ; next, a man "rips" a board with a copper saw; next, two men are finishing off a couch, and at the right a man is drilling a hole with a bow-drill. Scene from the chapel of a noble's tomb. Compare a finished chair belonging to a wealthy noble of the Empire (see cut on page 21) to such thinness that the sunlight glows through its dark-gray sides. The booth of the goldsmith is filled with workmen and apprentices weighing gold and costly stones, hammering and casting, soldering and fitting together richly wrought jewelry which can hardly be surpassed by the best goldsmiths and jewelers of today. 27. The Potter's Wheel and Furnace; Earliest Glass. In the next space on this wall we find the potter no longer building up his jars and bowls with his fingers alone, as in the Stone Age. 1 Before the end of the Pyramid Age the coppersmiths had learned how to harden their tools by melting a small amount of tin with the copper. This produced a mixture of tin and copper, called bronze, which is much harder than copper. It is not yet cer- tain where the first tin was obtained or who made the first bronze, but it may have come from the north side of the Mediterranean (Ancient Times, 336).