Construction in North America has destroyed a lot of the indigenous archeological record, however. It's more valid to say they didn't worry about it, but perhaps should have.
Common misconception, but municipal legislation so rarely detonates it's somewhat of an urban myth, even poorly constructed local bills from the WWII era.
“There’s a long history of western archaeologists doing this work. So it’s great to see their own discoveries – and the fact that she’s a woman archaeologist, an Egyptian woman archaeologist, is even more welcome.”
"These tombs [were] so frequently raided by tomb raiders that there was no guarantee that anything exciting would be down there."
From a wider angle, what are archeologists doing? Aren't they raiding tombs too? They are disturbing someone's tomb. They claim a higher goal of revealing how these ancient people lived, but they are still tomb raiders.
Grave robbery is the plundering of grave goods to sell them on the antiquities market. Gaining evidence about the past is not a goal, so there's no attention given to documenting the site as it is excavated nor to preserving non-salable artifacts. Indeed, since these digs are usually illicit, documenting the provenance of the objects and the excavation process is a liability. Any "restoration" that's done to the grave goods is done to increase its attractiveness in the market, often using techniques that destroy any of the limited value it already had to archeology after being divorced from its original archeological context.
Archeology digs things up to learn about the past. Sure, some of the prettier objects might end up on display in a museum, but studying the objects and the context they were found in is the point. The majority of a dig's finds are going to live in basement storage for scholars to study. These aren't treasures to be collected to impress people or demonstrate wealth. We're often talking about scraps of leather, potsherds, nails, scraps of wood... nothing impressive. Grave robbers would just destroy any of this if it got in the way of the treasure they're after. The digging is careful and well-documented. The context the objects are found in is often more telling than the objects themselves.
This is sometimes asked in jest, and sometimes as a serious question. It's a bit hard to know which leg you lean on. But in case it is an honest question I would say two major factors are:
1. The manner in which it is done and your motive. E.g. Are you taking care to preserve the grave and the buried? Are you primarily looking for things which has a monetary value? And what are potential descendants saying about you doing it?
2. The time which has passed. E.g. If it has become "forgotten" and not taken care of regularly it could maybe be seen more as a historic site rather than a grave.
I mean in the west / europe, clearing old graveyards is pretty common after a while. I looked up the legislation, basically when you buy a grave plot, you pay for the rights for a minimum of 10 years. That is separated between above and underground rights; if the above ground rights have passed, the grave stone and other above ground items are removed; if the underground rights have passed and the site has been resold, any leftover remains (bone fragments at that point) will either be excavated and put into a mass grave, or buried a bit deeper 'below' the new grave.
But a more accurate comparison would be the elite, they get interred in family crypts or under church halls for hundreds of years (or indefinitely, maybe if there's a major religious or political revolution will they get removed, destroyed, or forgotten).
The modern-day cathedrals and mausoleums may end up being the pyramids of future generations. like, 4-5000 year future generations. I'm sure they'll survive the nuclear apocalypse.
I think the way it works in france is that when you buy a graveyard plot, you buy it forever, as long as someone maintains it. If the plot isn't maintained, after a while it is deemed abandoned and reclaimed.
The one that looks like it has been designed to resist nuclear apocalypse is Lenin's mausoleum. I know I'll be dead anyway, but still, the thought that all that will be left of our civilisation is the remains of that "great ruler"...
Are you attempting to ask honest question here or are just taking a contrarian position against a view I do not hold? Are you unaware that it is fully possible to study a subject while also respecting it? It also seems to me that the questions you are asking are very black-and-white such as "And where is the limitation?" on an issue where there are many nuances.
Despite how little we know of ancient rites, I am fairly confident that being exposed in a museum or transferred to the storage room of a warehouse is far from the respect expected by the deceased when the burial was arranged, no matter how much care you take.
It’s a kind of value debate that has no definitive answer anyway. I am personally on the side that once dead, the corpse is just a stack of decaying meat which doesn’t command respect in itself. So it’s really a function of respect to the livings to whom the deceased meant something. And this wanes fairly quickly. Perhaps a century or two for a random quidam. Perhaps a few centuries for someone illustrious. But I am not religious either.
Y-bar gave an excellent reply, but further to that the fact is grave robbing and raiding for profit is a thing that happens. Vast amount of historical information and material has been lost this way already, and more is lost every year. Leaving things in the ground is no guarantee that they will stay that way. There's an argument that by excavating this material respectfully, gaining as much information as possible and preserving these artefacts is better than abandoning them to eventual robbery and destruction.
I think there are plenty of countries who would consider the acquisition of objects by the British Museum as grave robbery, or morally equivalent. (Unless that is the joke you were making :) )
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 unfortunate that they still think the Ramesses were not such generations. 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
From that photo I would actually say that the box is not a perfectly flat cuboid. If you look at the bottom left of the picture it looks to me as though the "face" is actually not perfectly straight. If you looked at this from the side I would expect it to look more like this:
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/ <---
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The arrow shows our vantage point.
This doesn't seem to be entirely straight across the entire face either (unlike my crude ASCII "drawing"). Almost like a huge ball 'dented' the stone.
There's also a huge flash and glare going on which doesn't help and probably overexposes the specks that you see are also present in other pictures (like you posted in the sibling thread).
If you know that then why do you say the lines aren't straight? The ones that look as if they weren't straight seem to be perfectly straight but are following those dents and thus look like they aren't. Especially if your vantage point exacerbates that.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they ran a financial pyramid and the music stopped. Funding had ran out. Interest rates went up. Rampant inflation. People can’t feed themselves, no one cares about smooth rocks anymore. They just want a sandwich and a roof.
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.
Nobody suggested they were not made by Egyptians. You made that up, too.
We don't know which generation of Egyptians did the top quality work. As already noted, inscriptions only establish a lower bound on age, but no upper bound. Evidence strongly suggests the means to do such work were lost, early on.
"Machined" describes the precision of the work. If you know how to get that without precision equipment, reveal it.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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
Unexploded ordinance from WWII and accidently digging up pharaohs.