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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
As someone who can read the inscriptions you're talking about: they're not crude at all.
https://www.ancient-code.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/saqq...
https://www.theancientconnection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021...
Which crude tagging are you referring to here?
There's not much writing there, but I wouldn't call that crude.
That there is no uniformity is more evidence that they were tagged.
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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).
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.
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.
Here, I will reproduce it for you: "We don't know which generation of Egyptians did the top quality work."
Now you may ignore it in both places.
I believe it. Walk around New York City or Paris and compare the level of detail in construction from a historic building to a recently built one.
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.
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.
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.
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