King Tut's coffin is made of pure gold, the degree of purity of the gold of our ancestors was not achieved by science until the beginning of the 20th century. A block of pure gold weighs about 110 kg. There is no block of gold as heavy as this one on Earth... This very precise interlacing and inlaying with turquoise, agate and all gemstones is unparalleled on the planet... None of these thousands of small pieces of precious stones fell despite remaining underground in a very hot desert for about 3,500 years... This magnificence, fabulous precision and miraculous beauty has not been repeated in all human civilizations... Now it is not possible to create something like that, no matter how modern the equipment they use. This is the pinnacle of human miracle and the pinnacle of manual skill since the first man walked the Earth.
The idea that we could not make anything as well as the Ancient Egyptians did is absurd.
We make very different things, with a much greater range of materials that they ever had, and when required to far higher standards of accuracy and precision than they could achieve.
@NinaTina That depends on the material and on the conditions of storage or burial; but many of the things we make are not designed to last for millennia - a good deal of mass-produced goods is made to last no more than 10 years.
A gold, bronze or pottery item made in Ancient Egypt and enclosed in a pyramid in a desert will last indefinitely.
So will a gold, bronze or pottery item made by our industrial process today - if we let it. bronze buried in the ground will corrode away very slowly, depending on ground conditions, but a lot of exquisite Bronze Age goods are still nearly intact.
Steel, wood and some plastics will deteriorate relatively rapidly.
Glass and pottery is fragile, and gold very soft, but these are chemically very stable. Gold is very nearly inert, which is why it is found in elemental form.
When the steel hulls and machinery of deep-sea shipwrecks like the 'Titanic' have finally rusted away, their sites will be marked by all sorts of glass, pottery and perhaps copper-alloy items for many thousands of years hence... assuming they are left alone and not plundered of course. They will become buried very, very slowly in sediment, their eventual fate millions of years further hence.
If things we make now don't last it's because we don't need or want them to last!
Ancient people were just as smart as we are; they just lacked the same technology. It's a disservice to them to claim that they must have been assisted by extraterrestrials or time travelers. Part of the problem is their failure to document clear instructions for their achievements, which they felt no need to do as most of this knowledge was passed down orally, from masters to apprentices.
I once read a book explaining the Pyramids as gigantic water pumps. The author figured out that the interior passages were designed to use the power of burning fuel to pressurize water. Symbols like fish (meaning water here), birds (air here) and upside-down birds (no air or a vacuum) were intended as signs for illiterate workers. Contrary to popular belief, the Pyramids were never used as tombs. Kings were buried in secluded places to discourage robbers.
I don't know if this guy was right, but it's an intriguing theory. He explained the Pyramids' construction as having been filled with water, with the stones moved on wooden barges with fork lift extensions, by well-paid laborers doing fairly easy work.
@NinaTina How long does what last? If you are referring to a block gold constructed atom by atom then it will last just as long as any other block of gold.
@NinaTina The problem is that there are plenty of people who do believe that the ancient Egyptians could do things that we can't, or alternatively, that they couldn't do them and needed aliens to do those things instead. On the Internet without body language and perhaps a sly smile it's hard to tell whether you are such a believer or not.
