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> 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 invad

> 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.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]

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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]