A while back I caught a bit of a show on TV about some people working on restoring an ancient Greek temple. One of the things they mentioned was how well the stones fit together. For instance, the columns were made of short stone cylinders piled on top of each other. The fit between adjoining pieces is such that you couldn't slide a piece of paper in between them.
The question is: how did they manage to make these multi-ton stone pieces fit together so well, when all they had were hand tools? This got me to thinking, and eventually I came up with a solution. It may not be correct, but I like it. The answer is they were ground in place.
You cut the stone pieces as best you can. Then you spread some grinding compound (a harder sand) on the top surface, set the next piece on top, wind ropes around the upper piece and put your slaves to pulling on the ropes. The cylinder will rotate in place and slowly grind away the high spots until the two pieces mate perfectly.
If this seems a little far fetched, it is probably because we are not used to employing hundreds of people to accomplish a simple task like grinding a surface flat.
On the other hand, the ancient Greeks were pretty smart, and this was a big project, so they could have just used a straight edge and some grinding stones to put a flat surface on the stone. It would have been tedious and time consuming and taken a long time, but hey, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Tam's post about painting ancient statues and engraving modern firearms reminded me of this.
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