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So it appears grave robbers did get there first, but left the mummy case alone. It is good that they acknowledge tunnels were re-used by later generations, but

• someotherperson 4y ago
  > We will need to wait for another of our own generations to learn who really made, e.g., the many precision-machined 50+-ton empty stone boxes under Saqqara, and why Are they empty? From memory those were used to house mummified bulls and there are inscriptions on some of them detailing that purpose.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    By report all are empty now. There are crudely carved inscriptions on some that are very obviously not by whoever did the exquisite original work of making the boxes. Tagging work that was already ancient was a favorite activity of dynastic Egyptians. Ramesses II was especially fond of the practice, but for some reason not even he tagged pyramids. Some later generation of Egyptology will acknowledge that a cartouche carved into a piece of stonework only fixes a lower bound on its age, and cannot by itself identify who made it. You can feel with your fingertips the difference between the quality of the work that went into the tagging, vs the original work. The oldest and best work had originally no inscriptions, although they were easily added. Somehow the methods for doing the very best stone work were lost, early on. Early pillars were made all in one piece, later were stacked. It is hard to believe later generations were always just too impatient to bother doing top quality work.
    • once_inc 4y ago
      > It is hard to believe later generations were always just too impatient to bother doing top quality work. I very much feel that this is an exact mirror of what we see today in modern construction: simpler, _cheaper_ materials, less time-intensive work to reduce the cost of construction. As time progressed in Ancient Egypt, people might have had different perceptions of what was desirable in construction of these landmarks. Perhaps the political will as lacking to keep building vast, high quality landmarks, or perhaps the pharaos found out building something for three decades is risky since you don't know if you will live that long.
      • ljlolel 4y ago
        Perhaps ancients had a similar ratio of high quality and mostly low quality. It’s just that the only pieces that survived are the very large high quality rocks, all of their quick cheap stuff broke up quickly.
        • mitthrowaway2 4y ago
          It's not the lack of ancient low-quality work that surprises, but the absence of more recent high-quality work.
          • dr-detroit 4y ago
          • ncmncm 4y ago
            Exactly. If they could still do high-quality work: mirror-smooth surfaced, extra-hard diorite, carved with exact bilateral symmetry, you would expect to find some of it done for highest-status people, even if it were no longer squandered on huge monuments.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        That does not account for the entire lack of late, smaller, top-grade work. So, maybe 100-ton mirror-smooth columns no longer impress. Not making anything mirror-smooth, at any scale, or anything 100 tons even if no smooth, really calls into question whether you still can.
        • simonh 4y ago
          Sure, maybe they couldn't because the techniques had been lost which we know is a thing that happens, or maybe they chose not to. Or maybe aliens. This is basically a god of the gaps argument, we don't know so therefore let's fill the gap with the wackiest made up fantasy crap we can think of. Well ok, if you like but it's basically just entertainment and nothing to do with reality.
    • Tuna-Fish 4y ago
      > Somehow the methods for doing the very best stone work were lost, early on. The Egyptian state outright collapsed at least thrice, and was successfully invaded at least that many times. I find it easy to believe that during one of those collapses, some knowledge about construction was lost.
      • fsloth 4y ago
        Complex engineering seems to need complex economy and stable institutions to sustain knowledge transfer. You just need to loose one generation and suddenly a ton of skill and knowledge is lost.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          Loss of skills is wholly plausible. Failure, over centuries of development, to re-develop those skills remains a mystery, but is also plausible. The real mystery is that we have no hint of how those feats were achieved, or achievable, with technology they plausibly had access to at the time. There is no hint of remains of tooling that could have been used to produce many of the artifacts. Modern stonemasons have nothing that could do some of it, e.g. the Saqqara boxes. There are no aliens to invoke. People did things that we have no clue how they did, or even of how they could have done them. What is offered -- copper chisels -- is just wildly inadequate.
          • zppln 4y ago
            Pardon my ignorance, but what makes these boxes so unique? This thread made me look into them on Wikipedia, and they seem fairly straight forward..? I'm not a stonemason, but couldn't you basically just carve them out with a chisel (given you're not in a rush)?
            • ncmncm 4y ago
              A series on YouTube, Origins of Precision, can help you get up to speed. It is not surprising that historians and archaeologists are not, as a rule, up on that material. But they have no excuse after it was explained to them. There is also the question of how the boxes were maneuvered down those tiny tunnels that would not admit enough people to do the work.
    • bluepizza 4y ago
      > It is hard to believe later generations were always just too impatient to bother doing top quality work. I believe it. Walk around New York City or Paris and compare the level of detail in construction from a historic building to a recently built one.
      • FridayoLeary 4y ago
        A good point. Also, i don't think any of our great buildings (i.e empire state building, all those skyscrapers made from steel frames and glass) or technology will survive 400 years into the future. They will think we never made anything. Not only that, but they will dismiss written accounts as fiction. Even our plastic waste should have largely dissolved by then.
      • FridayoLeary 4y ago
        A good point. Also, i don't think any of our great buildings (i.e empire state building, all those skyscrapers made from steel frames and glass) or technological marvels (like jets) will survive 400 years into the future. They will think we never made anything. Not only that, but they will dismiss written accounts as fiction. Even our plastic waste should have largely dissolved by then.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          It is not. Remnants -- turbine blades -- will survive. Plastic will last for geological eons.
        • permo-w 4y ago
          our graveyards will
    • evol262 4y ago
      We know the answer to this, and it was... the Egyptians. The mistake the earlier Egyptologists made is exactly the same one you're making here, which is that history is some kind of inevitable march towards progress where knowledge and skills are never lost, and we never go backwards. There's firm archaeological evidence around quarry sites, etc. The same (pretty nonsense) questions could have been asked about Roman concrete or how tunnels were bored through the Apennines for aqueducts or whatever else you feel like during the late Middle Ages, despite the fact that the demographics of Italy hadn't really changed. The gap in time between Khufu and Ramses is basically the same as the gap between the reign of Augustus and the Hundred Years' War.
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        Obviously Egyptians made everything. Who else, aliens? At issue is how. We do not know. No one is working on it, or anyway publishing. Pretending there is no mystery, as is the habit lately, is not honest.
        • mcphage 4y ago
          > Obviously Egyptians made everything. Then why did you say: > We will need to wait for another of our own generations to learn who really made, e.g., the many precision-machined 50+-ton empty stone boxes under Saqqara, and why. If the issue isn’t who, or why, but how?
          • ncmncm 4y ago
            We can be confident that whoever crudely tagged the boxes did not make them. We do not know when they were made, which is to say which generation of Egyptians made them, or for what, or how, or why they left one in the middle of the hallway, or how they could have moved any of them into place. What is offered is obviously inadequate.
            • mcphage 4y ago
              > whoever crudely tagged the boxes did not make them Which crude tagging are you referring to here?
    • permo-w 4y ago
      look at Western architecture. over the course of the last century, our most expensive constructions have gone from beautiful detailed brick buildings to (in my opinion) awful uniform brutalist and modernist slabs of concrete and glass. white walls and big windows because of a wave of extremely poor taste in the post-war architectural community, many of the skills required to make those older style buildings are gone or no longer common. it's easy to see something like this happening in ancient Egypt. perhaps the Nile delta didn't fully flood for a few years, or there was a bad war. or it just became too expensive to use the old techniques and they died out
• dr-detroit 4y ago