> Obviously Egyptians made everything.

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 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.

> whoever crudely tagged the boxes did not make them

Which crude tagging are you referring to here?

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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:

     --- 
       |
       |
      /   <--- 
     |

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).

Yes, some faces have what look like dents in or scoops out of them, probably from fractures in the mother stone, or from quarrying.

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.

I am saying they are not straight even on the flat parts.

Maybe it's easier to grind the surfaces flat than to carve in small detailed images.

I see that you have not looked pictures of any other Egyptian artifacts.

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.

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.

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.

Their physical execution is crude. We may presume they were transcribed from papyrus written by poets laureate of the period.

I'm talking specifically about their physical execution. It's not crude. I've seen plenty of sloppy hieroglyphs. These aren't them.

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...

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

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

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 each thing.

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

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