> 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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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.
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?