Posted on 05/29/2022 6:52:53 AM PDT by bert
Thanks for posting!
I would offer time and labor, without directly answering your question.
The above balanced bowl, for instance. Given this balance as the goal, I could see the artist spending large amounts of time, grinding, to achieve it. No two bowls probably have the same dimensions out of thousands, though.
I believe they had a spinning table for clay. Diamond dust ground onto it would do wonders. Something like this is what Diamond cutters use, today.
Two thousand years before the Greeks were carving their naturalistic sculptures out of marble (Mohs scale of 3), the Egyptians carved this from gneiss (Mohs scale of 7, the same hardness as granite and steel).
I can't say why Egyptian art seemed to become more stylized over the centuries, but they certainly had the ability to make naturalistic art when the wanted to.
In the posted video the host was NOT claiming that “they know how to do something”. Quite the opposite, in the case of the precision crafted fine granite box, the host suggests there is presently no known answer for how the box was crafted in the time period in which it is presumed to have been made.
Understood. You read my first post in which I failed to include the key word "don't" before know. I corrected it in a followup post #7 included belowOops!. Just because someone who makes a video says they don't know how to do something doesn't mean no one knows how to do it.
Yes. That is very precise realism, and they could, and did, do it.
Perhaps the tomb paintings are simply wall-covering. You carve out a tomb and throw something up so that it is not bare rock. It survives for millennia simply because it’s painted on rock, not because it’s valued art. A statue, such as you show, is also there.
The host of the video is very knowledgable, not only in Egyptology but in stone works, the crafting of them, and demonstration with remaining examples of stone works as they remain, in situ, in various stages of progress.
I think he makes a very reasonable case against the geopolymer theory, as the explanation for ALL, ancient grand stone works, and also a good case for our lack of ability to explain how something like the granite box was crafted in the time period it is said to be part of.
He says, rightly I believe, in is own way, that some things in Egpyt were posssibly not created by “classical ancient Egyptians” but inherited by them, used for their own purposes and were made by even much more ancient peoples, of which we know nothing at all.
A clue to the granite boxes in the Serapeum??
Is Pharaoh Amasis saying that Horus built the first granite box for his father Osiris?
If so this gives a timeline date for the first granite box????
https://archive.org/details/ASAE-26-1-1926/page/n51/mode/1up
P.52 [93]”Now his Majesty, his piety(?)1 is like that which
Horus did for his father Osiris; making for him (Apis) a great coffin of granite.”
Vol 26, Fasc. 1: Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte (1926)
by Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte
author Gunn, Battiscombe, [Two] ‘Misunderstood Serapeum Inscriptions’
We know the Egyptians used soft copper saws and a slurry of fine sand and water ... why couldn’t something the size and shape of a jointer plane be used with a copper shoe (instead of a rotating disk saw) on the inside of such a box?
Interior corners could be achieved with something like a molding plane.
The actual cutting is with the grit and water, not the hand tool, and by using a long tool flatness is easier to achieve.
Best of all, this idea should be testable to see if it even works.
Thanks, for adding a great complementary piece on this thread.
It is entirely possible that the science/art of doing some things with stone represents examples of lost knowledge and why it became lost is maybe the mystery.
I have no difficulty believing that lost civilizations preceeded our own. What I can’t explain is the absence of metals and sophisticated alloys among relics.
Granite counter tops. I know it’s not a bowl.
Could it be a difference, and missing a trained ability to distiguish how to sqaure the difference, between carving something in three dimensions and making a three dimensional representation in two dimensions - sometimes referred to as being able to draw “perspective” in art. Sculpting and drawing can require different artistic skills not always combined within the same craftsman. Just a guess - regarding the very “flatish” Egytian painted figures of people amid the same society that seemed to have very accurate, sometimes exquisite, life like three dimensional sculptures of the human form. One other explanation would be the painted flat human figures and the very life like three dimensional human sculptures were crafted by peoples of very different time periods.
Maybe Fred Flintstone was a real person.
Seriously, the major difference in modern man and nowadays is the knowledge base and the materials we can work with. In terms of rational thought and wisdom, their best is on par, if not better, than our best.
Thats true except that those who claim to know cant do it either. They can not replicate any of the cutting or drilling using tools known to have been in possession of the Egyptians.
Those who have tried have all failed quite miserably including a few who later claimed victory.
It is my personal opinion that the ancients were taught by ‘someone’ how to use sound to soften stone so it could be worked. The massive interlocking stones in Peru and the precise shapes of these bullock burial vaults have something in common, IMHO.
Excellent observation! The Egyptians had statuary that is lifelike, so they knew how to sculpt the human form.
Bkmk
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