Blame This Famous Book for the Myth That Ancient Egyptians Used Planes

Top row: Workers use sandstone to smooth wood. An adze is pictured on the right. Bottom row, left: Workers use adzes to finish a cabinet and a figurine. Photo: kairoinfo4u. Life and Death in Ancient Egypt (see note 2) translates part of the hieroglyphics as, "Every craftsman who takes up the adze — he is more exhausted than a corvée laborer."

John Moody’s The American Cabinetmaker’s Plow Plane: Its Design and Improvement 1700-1900 is the most frustrating reference book I know. It’s a compendium of photos and information found nowhere else. It’s also riddled with typos and serious errors. And it’s most likely the source of the misconception that the ancient Egyptians had planes.

When Moody published his book in 1981, Jack Kebabian reviewed it in The Chronicle. Kebabian is one of the field’s great historians. Among his many accomplishments, he discovered the identities of some of America’s first planemakers, including Francis Nicholson and Cesar Chelor.¹

Moody begins the book with a story of an imaginary “cabinet maker” working for an Egyptian pharaoh. He writes “there are murals which suggest the use of planes,” but gives no examples or sourcing for the claim. He then repeats the claim twice more in later pages. Moody calls his story “a nice piece of folklore perhaps — or perhaps the truth.” It is neither. “Egyptians of the period of the pharaohs,” writes Kebabian in his review, “did not have planes.” The best depictions of carpentry from that era come from a mural in the tomb of Rekhmire, vizier to the pharaoh Tuthmosis III (d. 1425 BC). (The images in this post are taken from that mural.) Workers used sandstone and adzes to smooth wood. Egyptologists have found no murals, or any other evidence, that “suggest” carpenters had planes.²

Moody’s “folklore” has been repeated as fact multiple times in print and online, including by Rob Cosman, the well-known woodworking instructor, and in the pages of Fine Woodworking magazine. Even though many of the sources don’t cite Moody, I point to him as the likely originator because they use his exact word: suggest.

That’s not the only problem with Moody’s book. Kebabian describes two more remarkable errors:

On page 6 we read that “the earliest known English reference to plows may have been in 1594 when joiner Humphrie Bayne promised “a plowe” to his apprentice John Sparke”. This is credited to “W.L. Goodman, Industrial Technology ‘Woodworking Apprentices and Their Tools”’. The facts of this reference are as follows: the joiner was named Humfry Bryne, not Humphrie Bayne. The planes promised to John Sparke in his apprenticeship indenture were “a fore plane a Joynter a smothen plane two moulden planes a groven plane”; i.e., there was no reference whatsoever to “a plowe”. The article by Goodman appeared in the periodical Industrial Archaeology, (IX, 4, 1972), not Industrial Technology. (I have before me a photocopy of the Bayne-Sparke passage). It is very difficult to imagine how so important a reference could be so garbled and mangled. As it stands, it is downright deceptive.

On page 10 we are told that “the first American plow planes were wedge arm types — produced during the latter part of the 18th century”. On page 11 the story is, “it appears that as early as 1683-1750 Americans had begun to use wooden thumbscrews to maintain the arm setting”. There is a more than slight contradiction here. It would be interesting to know where there now is any American plow plane (or any other plane, in fact) that can be dated to 1683. The earliest American plow plane known to your reviewer was made by Francis Nicholson (born c. 1683, died in 1753) who certainly was not making planes in his cradle. It is a screw-secured type.

As Kebabian points out, the book has no footnotes so it’s unknown where Moody sourced most of his information from. Then there are the typos. Kebabian describes several, including pharaoh misspelled seven times on page three, and the last name of Robert Wooding (maker of one of the first known examples of an English plow) misspelled on pages 10 and 11. I found five more misspellings in Moody’s own text. The second half of the book consists of plow plane patents. Instead of printing copies of the original patents, Moody re-typed all of them. There are at least 34 misspellings in these re-typed patents. (See footnotes for the full list.)³

Top row, right: A worker dimensions lumber using an adze, square, and straight edge, which he's holding against the wood. Finished boards are lined up below him. Photo: kairoinfo4u.

How does Moody’s book compare to other books published at the same time? Ken and Jane Roberts’ seminal books, Planemakers and Other Edge Tool Enterprises in New York State in the Nineteenth Century (1971) and Wooden Planes in 19th century America (vol. 1 1975, vol. 2 1983), also received scathing reviews when they were published.⁴

Peter Welsh, former assistant director general of museums at the Smithsonian Institution, and editor of the Institution’s Journal of History, called Planemakers and Other Edge Tool Enterprises a “tedious recitation and repetitious display of ‘source material’ assembled by the Roberts. Sadly, the book will not be easily read. In fact, its literary value is directly proportional to the authors’ general lack of critical acumen.” In his review of Wooden Planes in 19th-Century America, Welsh starts his critique by pointing out that his own name had been misspelled in the book. “Restraint has been done in by enthusiasm,” he writes, “and the overall usefulness of the book compromised by a lack of critical balance.”⁵

But does that make Ken’s books bad? In my opinion, no. I don’t think he was trying to write the kind of book Welsh was looking for. The so-called “tedious” source material Roberts compiled in his books and in his voluminous work in The Chronicle had never been published before. That kind of resource didn’t exist. So Ken created it. (Admittedly, there are many typos in his books, which can be distracting.)⁶

Welsh wrote that he hoped someday someone would author an “analysis of the planemaking industry in America, its technological, industrial, and economic consequences.” This is why Moody’s book fails. He wanted to write that type of analysis, but he didn’t seem to understand you can only do it if you have a rock-solid foundation of facts to build on. For me, The American Cabinetmaker’s Plow Plane is a pioneering, but substandard work. The tragedy is that it didn’t have to be that way. As Kebabian put it, many of the errors “could have been avoided with only a little more effort.”⁷

Lastly, I’ve gotten many things wrong in the three decades I’ve worked as a journalist. Acknowledging and correcting errors is just part of the job. If you spot something wrong in my work, feel free to give me the Kebabian treatment.

Interested in more stories about ancient woodworking?

• Roman Soldiers and Their Moulding Planes
• Blame This Famous Book for the Myth That Ancient Egyptians Used Planes
• If the Vikings Didn't Use Planes, Why Did They Write Poems About Them?
• Rhyken: Did the Ancient Greeks Really Have a Word For 'Plane'?
• What Ancient Hand Tools Do to Our Emotions
• Planes on Roman Coins and Sticking Crown Molding

This post was originally published as part of the The Tiniest Planes You’ll Never Use newsletter.