[evol262]

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]

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]

> 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]

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.

[wl]

You're overconfident. The consensus view in Egyptology is you're wrong about this. Maybe the consensus view is wrong and your fringe theory is more accurate, but it's really hard to have confidence that your theory is the correct one when it is almost universally rejected by people who study this.

As someone who can read the inscriptions you're talking about: they're not crude at all.

[ncmncm]

As I said, we will need to wait for a generation of Egyptologists not so eager to attribute everything to whoever was last to scratch his name onto it.

[wl]

The technical term for someone carving their name on something someone else had built is "usurpation" and it's hardly an obscure topic in Egyptology. It is definitely something people think of when dating objects and monuments.

https://escholarship.org/content/qt5gj996k5/qt5gj996k5.pdf

[ncmncm]

Their physical execution is crude. We may presume they were transcribed from papyrus written by poets laureate of the period.

[wl]

I'm talking specifically about their physical execution. It's not crude. I've seen plenty of sloppy hieroglyphs. These aren't them.

[mcphage]

> whoever crudely tagged the boxes did not make them

Which crude tagging are you referring to here?

[ncmncm]

You may look at the stuff carved on the outside of the Saqqara boxes yourself. Even images you can find online are wholly adequate to reveal how crude they are.

[mcphage]

I mean, looking at stuff like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Apis_Sar...

There's not much writing there, but I wouldn't call that crude.

[umanwizard]

I googled “Saqqara boxes” and didn’t find any images where one could really tell. Could you link to the images you’re referring to?