I once did a hotel project in Istanbul many moons ago which incorporated the ruins of an ancient palace into a modern hotel. At the time, it was a Hyatt, but now its called the Çırağan Palace Kempinksi. I was privileged to watch craftsman working over a year to restore the damaged stone facade, columns, and corbels by hand. They even made bathtubs on the jobsite from solid blocks of marble. The only modern tools they used were handheld circular saws, grinders, and sanders. There was a blacksmith with a portable forge working on the jobsite several days a week reforging/sharpening stone chisels and points for the masons. They used their chisels until they were just nubs.
It's fascinating to watch craftsmen produce architectural stonework neanderthal fashion. While they may have used scaled drawings when planning arches, corbels, columns and arrow slits in ancient times, every assembly, with every stone in the assembly, is drawn full-scale on a wooden floor in a shed at the jobsite using, you guessed it, dry lines, chalk lines, straight-edges, squares (often very large triangulated wooden squares), compasses, dividers, and trammels. No protractors. No slide rulers. No graduated rulers. No tape measures
In fact, scaled drawings are said to have been invented by Filippo Brunelleschi when he was designing and constructing the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Il Duomo) in Firenze, Italy beginning in 1296, the largest dome in the world for centuries. Historians say that prior to Brunelleschi, there was no such thing as architectural or engineering drawings anywhere in the world. No, Leonardo Di Vinci did excellent sketches and drawings, but not scaled orthographic drawings.
From this full-scale drawing on a wooden floor, stone masons fabricated parchment or leather patterns to simulate curved surfaces, and wooden patterns for layout and to check dimensions while cutting with hammer and chisel.
Stone masons were the most educated of the construction trades, were always in high demand for castle and cathedral construction, were often well-off financially, and were one of the few trades permitted to travel freely from jobsite to jobsite and from country to country.
But remember that standard weights and measures are a very recent invention. Prior to that, each area and each Lord insisted on using a different length for mile, foot, cubit and inch (hence the term "Ruler"), and used different divisions of each, so measuring using a graduated ruler or measuring chain was risky. Those old boys may not have know much algebra, but they knew how to measure and solve difficult trig problems with strings, dividers, squares and straight-edges better than almost anybody.
We could do worse than to learn from their example.