A History of Woodworking and Its Influence in Civilization

Throughout ancient history until our modern era, every civilization has used wood to create functional and beautiful decorative objects.

In this article, you will learn more about woodworking from

• Ancient Egyptians
• Noah and The Ark
• Old Testament Woodworkers
• Early Chinese Woodworkers
• Japan
• New Testament Carpenters
• Woodworking in the Middle East
• The Roman Empire
• Medieval Period
• Ancient Tools

You’ll see examples of woodworking from the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Romans, and others. Many other cultures around the world also practiced woodworking, with many different styles and techniques.

People have made simple wooden weapons for defense and hunting, and wooden tools for building shelters, throughout history. Archaeologists discovered a wooden club and digging sticks at the Kalambo Falls on the Kalambo River border between Zambia and Tanzania.

As people developed their woodworking skills, they became better able to hunt for food, clear land with axes to grow crops, and build boats, buildings, and furniture. Woodworking became essential to the advancement of civilization.

Because of the vast amount of material to cover related to the history of woodworking, this article will focus on woodworking from ancient times to the Middle Ages, focusing on some of the more prominent civilizations. Woodworking in other civilizations is left out, not because it’s less important, but because of the sheer volume of material. We will, however, briefly review some of the more prominent tools woodworkers used throughout history.

Ancient Egyptian Woodworkers

Ancient Egyptian drawings from 2000 B.C. depict wood furnishings such as beds, chairs, stools, tables, beds, and chests. There’s also physical evidence of these wooden objects, as many were found well-preserved in tombs due to the country’s dry climate. Even some sarcophagi (coffins) found in the tombs were crafted from wood.

Ancient Egyptian woodworkers were noted for regularly practicing their craft and for developing techniques that advanced the craft for future generations. For instance, they invented the art of veneering, gluing thin slices of wood onto a base.

The earliest examples of veneering are over 5,000 years old and found in the tomb of Semerkhet. Many of the pharaohs were buried with objects that had African ebony veneer and ivory inlays.

According to some scholars, Egyptians were the first to varnish or “finish” their woodwork, though no one knows what these finishes were made of. Finishing is the art of applying a protective coating to wood to preserve it.

Ancient Egyptian woodworkers used various tools, including axes, adzes, chisels, pull saws, and bow drills. Mortise and tenon joints are found as far back as the Predynastic Period, before the first pharaohs (about 3100 B.C.). Pegs, dowels, and leather or cord lashings strengthened these joints. Animal glue was used during the New Kingdom period (1570 to 1069 B.C.).

Egyptologists found the world’s oldest piece of plywood in a third-dynasty coffin. It was made of six layers of wood four millimeters thick, held together by wooden pegs.

The Egyptians used a variety of wood to build their furniture and other objects. The wood came from native acacias, local sycamore, and tamarisk trees. However, when deforestation occurred in the Nile Valley starting from the Second Dynasty, they began importing cedar, Aleppo pine, boxwood, and oak from various parts of the Middle East. They also imported ebony from Egyptian colonies to construct items that went into tombs, such as inlaid wooden chests.

Bible’s First Woodworkers

In the Book of Genesis, we meet one of the Bible’s first woodworkers: Noah. After God revealed His plan to destroy corrupt humanity with a flood, He told Noah to build an ark of gopher wood (translated as cypress in some Bible versions), coated with pitch inside and out.

God furnished him and his three sons with precise instructions and dimensions. The ark was to be 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits high. Using the common cubit of about 18 inches, that’s an ark about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet tall, roughly the height of a four-story building.

The sheer size of the Ark staggers the imagination and seems an impossible task for Noah and his sons. The Bible doesn’t say whether Noah had help beyond his sons, but the timbers for such a vast vessel would likely have been more than four men could handle.

After the flood, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat, a region that includes present-day eastern Turkey.

Old Testament Woodworkers

While Noah and his woodworking crew displayed exceptional skills in building the ark, the Hebrew Bible paints a different picture of the Israelite woodworkers during the time of Solomon. As described in 1 Kings 5, Solomon turned to Hiram, king of the Phoenician city of Tyre, for cedar and for skilled timber workers to build his temple.

The Phoenicians were skilled in intricate woodworking, such as making furniture inlaid with ivory carvings, but over the years the Israelites’ woodworking skills improved. In Isaiah 44:13, the prophet describes the carpenter and his tools, suggesting that during the era of the kings, the Israelites were becoming more adept and involved in carpentry. Carpenters were among those Israelites exiled to Babylon after the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 597 B.C. (Jeremiah 24:1; 29:2).

Lebanese cedar, imported from Lebanon, was one of the most popular building materials used in the Biblical world by ancient woodworkers because of its high quality, pleasant scent, and resistance to rot and insects. Many temples, palaces, and seagoing vessels were made from this wood, including Solomon’s famed Temple.

Cedar planks were also used in the so-called “Jesus Boat.” In 1986, two brothers discovered the boat on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee after a drought lowered the water level. Nothing connects it to Jesus directly, but it’s similar to the boats he and his disciples would have used to cross and fish the Sea of Galilee.

The boat is about 27 feet long and 7.5 feet wide, and its construction and radiocarbon dating place it around the 1st century B.C. or 1st century A.D. It was the first ancient boat this complete ever found in the Sea of Galilee.

Early Chinese Woodworking

Early Chinese civilizations also developed sophisticated woodworking, including precise measurements for making pots, tables, and other furniture.

Lu Ban, a carpenter who lived during the Spring and Autumn period (771 to 476 B.C.), is credited as one of the founders of Chinese woodworking. He’s said to have brought the plane, chalk line, and other tools to China. Some 1,500 years after his death, his teachings were compiled in the book Lu Ban Jing (“Manuscript of Lu Ban”).

This book documented his work as a carpenter and contained descriptions of dimensions for building various objects, such as flower pots, tables, and altars. It also provided specific instructions concerning Feng Shui (wind and water).

Feng Shui is the ancient Chinese practice of arranging objects in homes and workplaces to promote wellness, health, and happiness. Ironically, the book says almost nothing about the intricate joinery without glue or nails for which Chinese furniture is famous.

Japanese Woodworking

Japan is famous for its traditional joinery, in which precisely fitted joints hold pieces together without nails or glue. Woodworkers who practice these techniques today take pride in their mastery of the fitted joint.

Japanese woodworkers are also known for their high-quality, high-carbon steel blades. Cooperage (making tubs, barrels, and casks) and bentwood boxes were common for everyday household objects.

Woodblock printing, made from carved and inked wood blocks, was another highly skilled form of woodworking. Lacquering, developed in East Asia, has a long tradition in Japan, China, and Korea.

New Testament

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is called “the carpenter’s son” (Matthew 13:55), and in Mark, he’s called “the carpenter” (Mark 6:3). In Jewish tradition, a father was obligated to teach his son a trade, so Joseph would likely have taught Jesus carpentry.

Carpenters of the time of Jesus were often called upon to construct or repair plows or threshing sleds, cut a roofing beam or shape a yoke for a new team of oxen. They also met the demands for new doors and door frames or a storage chest and made various other repairs.

Sometimes they helped construct larger projects, such as building a wood balcony or making doors or stairs for a new synagogue. And, on occasion, a master carpenter would be asked to create a holy object such as a Torah cabinet to store Scripture scrolls.

Hebrew carpenters used a variety of wood species depending on what the job required. They included cypress, oak, ash, sycamore, and olive. For a special project, they might import expensive cedar from Lebanon.

When carpenters needed wood, they sawed tree trunks into thin boards with a large saw, with the help of other workers. Trees in that region were often not large or straight.

The carpenter’s tools mentioned in ancient sources were the saw, mallet, adze, plummet and line, chisel, rule stick, plane, and squares. They also used the bow drill, held in one hand by the handle, which they rapidly set in motion by drawing the attached bow back and forth.

The bow-lathe was a crude primitive tool, yet a skilled woodworker could produce decorative spindles and bowls like today’s woodturners. The woodworker turned the wood by pulling a leather strap back and forth like a bow. This motion moved the lathe and enabled the cut to be made in the turning wood.

With these tools at hand, carpenters from Biblical times possessed the skill to create intricately dovetailed, mitered, and dowelled joints. Combining considerable skill and patience, they often created splendid wood products.

Middle East

Woodworking in the Middle East goes back for many centuries, even to Biblical times, as evidenced in the descriptions of some items. For instance, the Book of Exodus chronicles the construction of wooden holy items for the Tabernacle of the ancient Hebrews.

The ancient woodworkers of the Near East built great wooden boats from timber that grew in Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) and along the Levantine coast (the eastern Mediterranean coast, including modern-day Syria and Lebanon). This wood was so coveted that invading armies often demanded it as tribute.

At Gordion, the capital of ancient Phrygia, associated with the legendary King Midas, archaeologists found finely made wooden furniture from the 8th century B.C., including a table inlaid with intricate wooden patterns. Near East woodworkers used lathes and wedges, mallets, chisels, hammers, drills, plumb bobs, compasses, and other essential tools.

Centuries later, Islamic woodcarvers in Persia, Syria, Egypt, and Spain created carved wooden window screens for mosques and homes, along with exquisite paneling and decoration for walls, ceilings, pulpits, fittings, and furniture. Their woodwork was elaborate and remarkably delicate.

The Roman Empire

The Roman Empire also had its share of skilled woodworkers. Wielding adzes, lathes, files, planes, saws, and drills, including the bow drill, they constructed aqueducts and waterworks using wooden scaffolding, built impressive warships and barges and erected strong and lethal battering rams and catapults for attacking enemy cities.

They also crafted furniture, including tables and chairs, with legs carved to look like animal legs or mythological creatures.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 preserved a remarkable record of Roman woodworking. At nearby Herculaneum, carbonized wooden furniture such as beds, tables, and cabinets survived, and a fresco in Pompeii shows a woodworker cutting a mortise at a workbench.

Roman woodworkers used a variety of wood for their wooden creations. Wood species included ilex (holm oak), beech, maple, elm, olive, and ash. The most prized was thyine wood, a fragrant wood the Romans called citrus wood. It comes from a North African tree in the cypress family, and tables made from it were costly luxury items. Thyine wood is also mentioned in Revelation 18:12 among the goods no one would buy after Babylon fell.

Woodworking in the Medieval Period

The medieval period, also known as the Middle Ages, occurred during the one thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, from about 400 A.D. to the 15th century. Since wood was the most common building material in the Middle Ages, carpenters prospered. They also were considered to be among the most skilled craftsmen.

In many towns, carpenters belonged to guilds, groups that protected the interests of people in certain trades, and they typically served apprenticeships with established carpenters. Their tools were much simpler than ours, but they had to know how to use them, along with math and woodworking. That knowledge was necessary to build furniture, wagons, and homes for people of that era, even kings and lords.

All buildings used wood in some way. Buildings were sometimes constructed almost entirely out of wood, from the framing for their walls and roofs to their siding and shingles. Even stone buildings required considerable wooden construction. For instance, while being built, wood was needed for scaffolding, ramps and frames to support arches until the mortar hardened. Later, wood was used for doors, window frames, floors, roof beams, and some interior walls.

Although most of the wooden buildings of the Middle Ages have long since vanished, we still have contemporary illustrations of buildings and other wooden structures either completed or under construction.

Woodworkers of the Middle Ages also were skilled in creating wooden figurines and statues, some of which still stand today. These Byzantine and Gothic pieces show the patience and skill of the woodworkers who made them.

Ancient Tools of the Trade

Tools are like windows to the past. They let us view the civilizations that created them. The more wooden objects a society produces, the more tools it needs and uses.

Axes and adzes were among the first tools created. Woodworkers used the axe to fell trees, and the adze, whose blade was turned 90 degrees, to dress timber.

The Minoan civilization of Crete used a combination axe-adze and is known for its double-headed axe. The axe-adze was also popular with Roman carpenters.

Ancient Egyptian handsaws had broad blades, some as long as 20 inches, curved wooden handles, and irregular metal teeth. Since the blades were copper, a soft metal, they had to be pulled, not pushed. Because the carpenter could not bear down on the cutting stroke, sawing wood must have been a slow, tedious process.

The Romans improved the handsaw in two ways. They used iron for the blades, making them stiffer, and they set the teeth of the saw to project alternately right and left. This made the saw cut slightly wider than the blade and allowed a smoother movement.
The Romans are also credited with the frame saw. The frame saw uses a narrow blade held in a wooden frame and is kept taut by tightening a cord. The principle of the frame saw lives on in the modern hacksaw.

Roman builders used the try square (also known as the carpenter’s square), the plumb line, and the chalk line, tools the ancient Egyptians had used before them. Egyptian woodworkers also used wooden pegs instead of nails and made the holes with a bow drill.

Because the bow drill is poorly suited to heavy drilling, Roman carpenters used the auger, a tool with a wooden cross-handle attached to an iron shaft with a spoon-shaped bit at the tip. It let the woodworker apply strong turning force and heavy downward pressure.

Woodworkers in the Middle Ages used a breast auger for drilling deep holes in ships’ timbers. It was topped by a broad pad the carpenter could lean on with his full body weight.

The Romans used forged iron nails on a large scale, along with another dual-purpose tool: the claw hammer.

The Romans are also credited with inventing the woodworking plane, and they used several types of planes.

Chisels are more ancient tools. Bronze Age carpenters used them with both integral handles and socketed wooden handles for house and furniture construction.

Early mallets were often carved from a single piece of wood and didn’t last long. Eventually, a handle was fitted to a separate head, which made a more durable striking surface.

Discovering preserved ancient wooden artifacts thrills modern archaeologists. It gives them, and us, a unique glimpse into the past and a tangible link to the people of past societies. Unfortunately, countless wooden objects didn’t last as long as those made from clay or metal.

Wood is naturally durable and can last thousands of years without significant change if kept in moderate, sheltered environments. But when wood is exposed to decay fungi, insects such as termites, light, excessive heat, and excessive moisture, it deteriorates. This is what happened to many of the wooden objects created centuries ago.

Moisture can be one of the most challenging conditions to control. Wood takes on moisture in high relative humidity conditions and releases it when it is lower.

Very high moisture can make wood swell, which can crush components and cause finish and glue failures. Very low moisture can damage wood too, causing splits, gaps in joints, and lifting veneers and inlays.

Because wood changes dimension with moisture, a skilled woodworker has to anticipate these changes to protect the finished piece. Ignoring moisture content is a recipe for disaster.

One tool ancient woodworkers never had is the moisture meter. Wagner Meters introduced its first pinless wood moisture meter, the L600, in 1980.

Wagner’s Orion^® pinless wood moisture meters use IntelliSense™ technology, which helps keep surface moisture from skewing readings so you measure the moisture in the wood, not on it.

Wagner meters also let woodworkers and flooring installers scan many board feet of wood quickly, which is handy for checking a large volume of wood or doing a quick check of current conditions.

Because Orion meters have no pins, they don’t damage wood surfaces the way pin meters do. They read moisture content from 4% to 32% and have settings for hardwoods, softwoods, and exotic tropical woods.

While many ancient tools didn’t last, Orion meters are built to, and they come with a 7-year warranty.

In Closing

Throughout the history of mankind, great forests blanketed many parts of the world. They provided civilization with a valuable and plentiful resource: wood.

Wood was easy to work and shape, so artisans used it in many ways. They created weapons and siege devices from wood. They built houses, temples, boats, furniture, plows, and even coffins using local woods, or for special needs, imported fine, aromatic woods from distant lands. They also sculpted statues and other decorative pieces from wood. When stone structures were erected, woodworkers used wood scaffolding to aid in their construction.

As civilizations advanced, they invented new tools to cut and shape wood or improve existing ones. Most hand tools woodworkers use today have changed little since ancient times.

Not being able to measure a piece of wood’s moisture content and let it acclimate before using it has ruined many finished objects, and moisture is one of the main reasons wood deteriorates.

We’d like to do our part to make sure that doesn’t happen to your project.

Shop Orion Moisture Meters

Last updated on October 8th, 2026