Battery = Energy?

The Bagdad battery

The only indication for electricity in the antiquity found so far is a collection of small pots which were found in the proximity of today's Bagdad. The oldest were found in a Parthi settlement, which was inhabited around the time of Christ's birth. The discovery site - a presumed hill which coincidentally was found to be an ancient village in 1936 - suggests even a later settling. The other pots even might have to be settled into the period to 1200 A.D.. From this, any usage of such devices in ancient Egypt seems to be very improbable.
Right from the beginning the chief excavator Wilhelm Koenig had the opinion that these pots had been batteries used for galvanizing items. Some finds and writings led to the belief that the Parthians knew a method of coating copper or silver with gold by using gold cyanide - without the use of electricity. With a reconstruction of the supposed battery the galvanizing rate could be quadrupled.

Battery = energy?

There are surely differences between an accelerated galvanizing technique and lighting a light bulb. In the first case small amperages and voltages are enough to do the job, but not in the second case. Even a small torch bulb needs about one Watt to shed a dim light.
The performance of a battery is the product of voltage and amperage (volt times ampere). The voltage is dependent on the distance of the so-called normal potentials on the electro-chemical scale, a principle known to us for approximately 200 years.
The amperage however depends on the surface of the used electrodes. An ideal battery possesses two electrodes with surfaces as large as possible, with materials lying apart as far as possible on the electro-chemical scale. For example disk batteries like the famous Volta pile, which consisted of copper and zinc plates. Or our zinc coal batteries, whose central electrode is an activated charcoal staff with an active surface as large as several football fields. The "batteries" found in Bagdad however are quite poor in comparison. Some contained only same metals (copper rods in copper cylinders) and can produce therefore no voltage at all. And those few who could contains the metal pairing copper/iron which are only 0.5 volts apart on the electro-chemical scale, with single rods of iron with a minimal surface as counter electrode.

Batteries = light?

I made a reconstruction of a Bagdad-type battery myself. It produced about 0.4-0.5 volts with open contacts, and had a short ciruit amperage of 50 mA. The electrical "performance" adds up to 25 milli Watts without connected devices (which breaks down to 1/10th with a single bulb attached).
That means however, that for the operation of only one 1 watt-bulb the ridiculous quantity of forty batteries is needed! Since each battery weighs approximately 2 kilograms, the Egyptian flashlight without rack and wiring would weigh around 80 kilograms!
Oh, after approximately 8 hours power output the inside of the battery decomposes into a green, poisonous mud which must be disposed of.

For the lighting of the building sites with batteries this means:

There is just another minor item always "forgotten" by the proponents of ancient batteries: The iron. Iron was a rare and precious metal in Egypt, because no ore is found there. The next iron ore deposits are in todays Turkey, and were in firm possession of the Hethites, which had a monopoly in manufacturing iron goods from around 1600 B.C. But each "battery" needed a central iron rod as main electrode. So it's simply impossible that a metal first used in 1600 b.C. played a major role in lighting pyramids built more than 1000 years before! Each battery contained about 150 gramms of iron, so for the whole 400 big graves about 17400 tons of this metal more precious than gold was needed!

From these numbers it can easily be derived that the operation of electrical lamps with the so-called Bagdad batteries was simply impossible. But no other antique energy sources are known, so that any lamp faces the problem of a missing power source.

In the television broadcast "Aliens - do they return?" by Erich von Daeniken, already addressed by me in the pyramid section, he tried to make a connection between Bagdad batteries and light in his typical way. He tried to suggest that a gas-discharge lamp could be powered with such a battery. So he connects a digital multi meter to the battery - a loud buzzing noise suggests a hight voltage. Then we can read a not defined voltage of "0293" on the meter; afterwards he presents a "reconstruction" of a Dendera-type gas discharge lamp also connected with a meter, and gives the impression that both voltages are of the same amount!

Other energy sources

"If the Egyptians already knew batteries, then different generators will probably have been known" is a merry, but absurd or missing way of proving a theory.
When Volta experimented with its (by the way 10000 times more efficient) batteries, he lived in the age of the research and progress. Each detail, each improvement was published and hundreds of scientists around the whole globe were busy with the study of nature and exchanged their results in innumerable publications. Nethertheless it lasted nearly 200 years until the induction was discovered, and out of this in the end the generator was developed. This needed an unbelieveable number of small steps, and each of these can be reconstructed from uncounted publications.

From the Parthic, Babylonic or Egyptian region however no evidence for a systematic study of physics or chemistry, which is a mandatory prerequisite for the development of such technique is known. But without this knowledge no genius amateur handicraftsman can "by coincidence" invent something like a generator. This conclusion is therefore just as soundly as the reason chain "They had wheels, therefore they knew a combustion engine".
As long as no find for the development of such a technology is made, we must exclude it. Even when Krassa/Habeck declare the Djed pillar surprisingly, after defining it in the first half of their book as "electrical insulator", as a generator, which produces electricity with "hot air and dust"...