[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]

Think of, sure. But act on? By the evidence, incentives run the other way.

[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.

[ncmncm]

A quick DDG image search turns up

https://www.ancient-code.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/saqq...

https://www.theancientconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021...

[wl]

Are you expecting a fancier, embossed style or something? Those look like they're executed just fine.

[ncmncm]

I would describe them as pecked. The lines are not even straight.

[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.

[ncmncm]

Relative to the tech needed to produce the boxes, that is extremely crude. But your pic is far from the most crude seen.

That there is no uniformity is more evidence that they were tagged.

[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?

[ncmncm]

Example: https://www.ancient-code.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/saqq...

[umanwizard]

Perhaps I’m just a philistine but it’s not obvious to me from that super-low-res photo that the carvings are so bad that they can’t have been made by the same people as the box itself.

[ncmncm]

The lines are, visibly, not even straight. The surfaces of the boxes are ground to flatness we could not improve on today.