"Diamond wire blades" are just a (much) faster and longer-lasting version of wet cord and sand, which is known to have been used since antiquity. Perforating and wedging - breaking along the dotted line, as it were - is an equally ancient technique. Just because it's a lot of hard work doesn't mean people weren't willing to do it.
This particular sarcophagus is from Ptolemaic-period Egypt, they had iron. But they managed to carve granite (and a bunch of other softer stones) before that, with copper and other tools. Not all of the techniques are known but a big part of the answer is that (unlike you!) they put long, sustained, organized effort into it'.
Any kind of blade material and sand will cut through most rocks with time and effort. I seen an old stone cutting mechanism that used a small water wheel, metal blades, and they just kept dumping sand under the blade as it got pushed back and forth by the water wheel. The metal caught sand bits which ground through similiar to diamond cutting blades today, just with sand. That example had multiple blades but I imagine a single blade would be faster although requiring extra attention in replacing the sand. I don't think egyptions used water wheels but it can also by done by hand albeit with a lot of effort, but they did have a lot of spare time in agricultural off seasons.
Right now companies use diamond wire blades to cut granite and it is not so fast and easy
The modern methods are done for speed and uniformity. If you're an ancient Egyptian, you probably have a lot more time to work on these things. Plus, you're probably not one person working on it.
Don't think of one guy banging rocks together. Think of a dozen skilled artisans with pretty good hand tools, and a longer-than-eight-hours workday.
They were normal employees as far as we know now. Nile agriculture was based on the predictable flooding of the Nile which meant predictable times of the year when all those laborers had nothing to do. But if you worked on the pyramids or other projects during the off season would could get free food and/or pay.
> Estimates given by various archaeologists for the size of the workforce at Giza tend to hover around 10,000 people for all three pyramids. These people were well-fed; in a study published in 2013, Richard Redding, the chief research officer at AERA, and colleagues found that enough cattle, sheep and goats were slaughtered every day to produce 4,000 pounds of meat, on average, to feed the pyramid builders. The finding was detailed in the book "Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the ICAZ Working Group 'Archaeozoology of Southwest Asia and Adjacent Areas'" (Peeters Publishing, 2013). Redding used the animal bone remains found at Giza, and the nutritional requirements for a person doing hard labor, to make the discovery.
> Redding also found that animals were brought in from sites on the Nile Delta and kept in a corral until they were slaughtered and fed to the workers.
> The workers' meat-rich diet may have been an inducement for people to work on the pyramids, Redding said. "They probably got a much better diet than they got in their village," Redding told Live Science in 2013.
> Dieter Wildung, a former director of Berlin's Egyptian Museum, said it is "common knowledge in serious Egyptology" that the pyramid builders were not slaves. "The myth of the slaves building pyramids is only the stuff of tabloids and Hollywood," Wildung said. "The world simply could not believe the pyramids were build without oppression and forced labour, but out of loyalty to the pharaohs."
> Hawass said the builders came from poor families from the north and the south, and were respected for their work – so much so that those who died during construction were bestowed the honour of being buried in the tombs near the sacred pyramids of their pharaohs.
> Their proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial in preparation for the afterlife backs this theory, Hawass said. "No way would they have been buried so honourably if they were slaves."
Kind of annoyed I can't find a single university website which says this using a quick google, but I guess most scholars don't make a big deal about common knowledge.
Look up "Ancient Aliens debunked" on youtube. It's essentially a three-hour long feature about ancient technology and what could be done with it. Very cool.
edit: and yeah, they go into great detail when discussing ancient masonry. Basically, the ancients used sand (as an abrasive) and wooden saws to cut hard stone like granite.
Right now companies use diamond wire blades to cut granite and it is not so fast and easy. Can not imagine ancients Egyptians could produce even steel
Also where have they got a granite in this part of Egypt... Aswan query known for having black granite deposits is 600 miles away.