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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

What is most amazing about that period is the thousands of carved stone bowls and jars, made from materials up to and including corundum–hard as ruby–machined with a precision that is wholly unaccountable, and all made before the pyramids.

The interiors of these vessels show machining marks incompatible with the tools they are imagined to have been made with. It will be very interesting when Zawi Hawass retires and, eventually, somebody figures out how they really were fabricated, and (moreso) why the method was lost.

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When Zawi Hawass retires virtually every existing Egyptology book will worth less than the paper it is printed on.

For someone who is unaware of Zawi Hawass and pretty uninformed about any serious Egyptology, can you explain what you mean. It seems a very interest topic for some medium reading while I wait in court tomorrow.

Zawi Hawass is like your over-zealous Wikipedia editor. He controls access to Egyptian antiquities. He has one story, and won't tolerate confusion. Everyone working has to be careful not to publish anything that might motivate him to exclude them.

Not so different, really, from a lot of professors and Wikipedia editors, but with the power of the State behind his opinions.

So Egyptology isn't really a science today, and I should not trust what I hear too much?

Yes, there are several artifacts that dont fit the Hawass history of Egypt. But attempts to change the known history have been stymied by Hawass.

Lots of amazing work is being done in Egypt right now most of it IMHO being done by Geologists because they are much less likely to have any attachment towards any established theory. Zawi Hawass seems to have contempt for anyone who comes to conclusions that doesn't align with the gated narrative even when those conclusion are very well reasoned (For example: water erosion around the Sphinx).

The official narrative that we were all taught in school of "Pyramids were built 4500 years ago as tombs by Khufu" I would say is understood to be highly inaccurate at this point by anyone outside of the Hawass circle.

> The official narrative that we were all taught in school of "Pyramids were built 4500 years ago as tombs by Khufu" I would say is understood to be highly inaccurate at this point by anyone outside of the Hawass circle.

I never heard of that before. What is thought to be more accurate?

First of all, nobody knows who built them, how they were built, nor why they were built. We only have vague guesses at this point.

No bodies were ever found in any of the Pyramids on the Giza plateau - and despite the Egyptians documenting everything, there are no claims by them that Khufu or anyone else in their documented history built the Pyramids. Pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Kings

Uh, the Valley of the Kings was only actively used for a comparatively short period throughout Egypt's entire history. What does it have to do with this? What do you think Egyptians did with their kings before the Valley of the Kings was established and after it ceased to be used?

> First of all, nobody knows who built them, how they were built, nor why they were built.

> and despite the Egyptians documenting everything, there are no claims by them that Khufu or anyone else in their documented history built the Pyramids.

https://www.livescience.com/55439-ancient-logbook-on-great-p...

> Over a period of several months, [the logbook] reports — in [the] form of a timetable with two columns per day — many operations related to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza and the work at the limestone quarries on the opposite bank of the Nile

I guess this Merer guy is one of those you were looking for.

1) There are hundreds of Pyramids in that area. To my understanding no bodies were found in any of them.

2) Gold and copper are the metals available during Khufu's reign. Is it reasonable to you that copper (or even Iron) was used to cut granite?

3) 2.5 Million blocks were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid. Weight of blocks range from 1-10 tons each.

4) The granite for the "King's Chamber" was brought 934km to Giza from Aswan

5) A 20 year construction timeline as claimed would mean a block would have to be cut from the quarry, moved to location, and placed in the correct spot every 4 minutes with construction running 24 hours a day 7 days a week without stopping.

Is it not more reasonable to conclude Khufu simply performed maintenance on the outer casings? A 20 year project with a 200 men crew to polish outer casings seems about right to me.

I'm beginning to get serious crackpot vibes from your comments. Why is it surprising that looted tombs after thousands of years don't contain bodies? (Even though for example the presumed mummy of Djedkare Isesi was found in his pyramid, so "no bodies were found in any of them" is simply a lie.) What has gold and copper have to do with working hard stones? What is it with the Great Pyramid blocks? They are far from the largest blocks manipulated in prehistory.

> Is it not more reasonable to conclude Khufu simply performed maintenance on the outer casings?

No, it's not.

> A 20 year project with a 200 men crew to polish outer casings seems about right to me.

Nobody claims the pyramids were built by 200 people. Egypt had a population of over a million at the time, with a few hundred thousand of that population being seasonally bored farmers available for construction projects.

1) Looters don't reseal pyramids.

2) Archeologists who unseal pyramids don't steal bodies and then simultaneously claim there were bodies in there. That would be self incriminating.

3) If pyramids were looted and found unsealed then the tomb theory is unsubstantiated.

4) Countless civilizations have done construction on the pyramids (including our own). Evidence of construction is not evidence of creation.

5) Copper & Brass can not reasonably be used to cut Granite. The Great Pyramid had impeccable precision. It is BY FAR the most precise Pyramid ever discovered.

6) The link you provided me is where the 200 men figure comes from.

You clearly have an interest in this topic. I suggest you do more research or if I'm wrong about something, be so kind as to provide supporting evidence with your claims.

There is a fair bit of graffiti on the blocks themselves suggesting it was done on behalf of Khufu. (It would not be surprising if the King's Chamber and everything on top were Khufu's project, build over top of an older pyramid the way Mayans did.)

But the cases of the Sphinx and the Valley Temple are less persuasive. The deep tunnels, moreso.

There does seem to be some evidence the Great Pyramid is be built on top of an older structure. However the bottom several layers are cut directly out of the bedrock which makes me hesitant on that theory since it fits so perfectly with the layers above.

Few mummies from the Old Kingdom survive. It was probably a combination of comparatively few people being mummified in that era, the mummification process being immature and thus less effective, and extreme age allowing for more looting and decay. It's unsurprising that you wouldn't find bodies in an Old Kingdom tomb.

Tellingly, the pyramids at Giza contain the same simple, unadorned carved granite sarcophagi you find in other Old Kingdom tombs. If the pyramids weren't intended to be tombs, you need to explain why they'd place sarcophagi inside them or explain how the sarcophagi are really something else.

Kings and nobles weren't buried in the Valley of the Kings until the New Kingdom. I'm not sure how that's relevant to the Old Kingdom.

The Serapeum of Saqqara, 5 mi away, is full of empty stone sarcophagus-shaped boxes with 10-ton lids, not apparently looted.

They are among the mysteries that must await Hawass's retirement to explore properly. AFAIK, nobody knows when or how they were made, or moved into place.

The Serapeum of Saqqara is a New Kingdom site at the earliest. (The name, suggesting a Greco-Roman context, is due to later activity at the site.) I'm not sure why you're bringing them up in an Old Kingdom context. And the decorated "sarcophagus-shaped boxes" are nothing like the Old Kingdom examples. For one, the empty Saqqara sarcophagi are inscribed with standard funerary texts we have no problems reading whereas the Old Kingdom examples are much more crudely constructed and entirely unadorned. It's curious the Saqqara sarcophagi are empty, but given the texts inscribed, the simplest explanation is that they just were never used.

The inscriptions were very obviously not done in the same physical culture as produced the boxes.

The boxes are marvels that could not be produced even by the best modern stonecraft methods. The inscriptions are crude hammerings; one might equally-well equate genetic engineering with tattooing. Nobody knows how old the boxes are, or the tunnels they are in. All that is clear is that later people used the site.

I don't find your conclusion obvious. Yes, the construction seems better than older Egyptian examples. But that makes sense: the later date of construction in the Iron Age means more ubiquitous iron tools. The inscriptions don't seem crude to me. Better than the Rosetta Stone. Worse than the Stele of Thonis-Heracleion. In short: You don't give Saite-period stonemasons enough credit.

But this is a digression. You want to use the refined, elaborately decorated Saite-period empty stone sarcophagi from Saqqara to suggest that the crude, unadorned stone sarcophagi of the Old Kingdom aren't really sarcophagi and the pyramids weren't tombs. If you're going to talk about how the impossible perfection of the sarcophagi at Saqqara means the Saites didn't produce them, for the sake of argument, fine. But you can't use the same reasoning to suggest the sarcophagi in the pyramids, which are by no means "marvels" of stonecraft, come from a different culture than the Old Kingdom.

I have no opinion about the intentions for boxes found in the pyramids, and no evidence to cite. But the idea of boxes never intended to contain actual, physical corpses is demonstrated not to be an absurdity.

The Rosetta Stone's uneven lines are markedly better-made than the crude inscriptions lately applied to the Saqqara boxes.

The quality and precision of stonework seen in the boxes at Saqqara most resembles that of the best archaic and pre-dynastic jars.

Pre-literate antiquities are in bad shape everywhere. In Egypt it is just easiest to see. Fertile Crescent. Caucasus. Indus Valley. China. Peru. Amazon. Sundaland.

There will be plenty of opportunity to shake things up someday.

Zawi Hawass deserves a lot of criticism for being a fickle, controlling gatekeeper of archeological work in Egypt in his former role as Egyptian Minister of Antiquities. He often seems more interested in glorifying himself and promoting revenue than the scholarly exploration of the past.

That said, he no longer holds any official position with the government. The Ministry of Antiquities has continued some of his bad policy. He still probably has some influence. But the people in this thread seem more upset with his dismissal of crank theories that contradict the consensus chronology established through dendochronology, radiocarbon dating, and correlating written records. Hawass was not responsible for creating this chronology.

Surface luminescence studies have been conducted on remarkably few samples. A test on a facing block of Menkaure's pyramid indicated the block was last exposed 5000 +/- 500 years ago, just barely edging into the conventional age of 4500 years.

Given the technique's obvious utility, the lack of interest seen in applying it can reasonably be interpreted as unwillingness to have conventional interpretations tested.

"Crank" is a prejudicial term when applied to topics with only conventional consensus, without evidentiary backing.

The more boring explanation: Egypt wants to control the exploitation of Pharaonic material culture under their control, which they consider their cultural patrimony. If they can't do the tests and get the glory, they don't want others to do so instead. For an example of this, see Hawass' decision preventing foreigners from doing DNA testing of mummies in Egypt, dismissing it as useless, followed by him personally publishing such work a decade later.

In any case, there is plenty of Old Kingdom material in foreign museums that is available for testing.

Surface luminescence testing depends on the sample not having been exposed to light since it was placed, something hard to ascertain for items shipped to a museum.

> materials up to and including corundum–hard as ruby

Corundum isn't just "hard as ruby", they are the same material.

That makes the comparison pretty exact.

But if you brought home any random chip of corundum and said, "look, a ruby", you might get funny looks. People can be pretty particular about their rubies and (not incidentally) sapphires.

They're only "right" in one of those cases. By definition, a ruby is red corundum, and a sapphire is corundum of any other color than red.

People do also like their rubies and sapphires transparent.

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