BryanMaloney
Premium Member
Been doing a little light reading lately on the history of technology and was reminded of the history of operative masonry. Simply put, iron is the first metal with which one can reliably work stone. Until the iron age, stone was always worked only with tools of wood and stone. The iron age began relatively recently (ca. 11th century BC). Scholarly consensus is that the First Temple was built in the mid-10th century BC. Thus, while a common interpretation of the mention of no iron tools in the building of the First Temple is that the parts were so inhumanly perfect from the quarry that no working needed to be done on site, a very reasonable interpretation could be that the Temple builders intentionally set aside their high-tech tools and returned to traditional tools (that were not the methods of thousands of years before, merely a century or so) for the sake of such a building, much as a great deal of the National Cathedral in the USA was intentionally built with older, more traditional methods and tools instead of using only the highest-tech available methods. Even in the present day we can see some special projects done using methods that were much more common in previous times, like timber frame construction.
