The Serapeum of Saqqara (Part 2 of 5: The Boxes)

In the last part in this series of five, I wrote about the discovery of the Serapeum and what it contained. In this week’s blog, I’m going to consider the boxes themselves – what they are and the manifold mysteries of their construction.

The Serapeum of Saqqara 

Part 2 of 5: The Boxes

The Boxes

Within the mysterious Serapeum of Saqqara, there are 24 stone boxes, each weighing 70 -100 tonnes. The boxes are enormous – 4 metres long, 2.3 metres wide and 3.3 metres tall. The box lids alone weigh 30 tonnes and are made from the same hard stone as the boxes.

The boxes were built with an incredible level of precision, showing an advanced knowledge of geometry and mathematics. Recent calculations suggest that the internal and external dimensions only deviate by thousands of an inch.

Most of the boxes were carved from hard rose granite [6.5 on the Mohs scale of hardness, which stretches from Talc (1) to Diamond (10)], from a quarry 800 kilometres away, the other boxes were made of an even harder material, diarite (7 on the Mohs scale), which came from a quarry even further away! 

One has to ask why, since they would not need to have worried about weathering underground, that the builders did not simply use limestone (a mere 2.5 on the Mohs scale), which was readily available from local quarries, was much lighter to move and was vastly more easy to shape?

Transport

Researchers have no idea how the boxes were moved or transported across such distances. Egyptologists point to bas relief depictions of stones being placed on wooden sledges, with men pouring water on the sand in front of the blocks but this explanation just doesn’t cut it when one considers the weights involved. Besides, the box that was abandoned in the Serapeum tunnel (see photograph above) has no wooden sledge under it. 

Positioning

Researchers have no idea how the boxes were moved into position in the Serapeum. Let’s say that each ancient Egyptian could pull a decent 200 kg in weight, that would mean five people would be required to shift each tonne. Thus, it would take a minimum of 250 people to move one of these boxes.

Since the main tunnel is, at its maximum, 2 feet wider than the width of a box, this means that the hundreds of people required to move a box of this weight, simply could not have fit inside the tunnel, let alone turn the box in the tunnel, or lower it (all are perfectly centred, by the way) into one of the niches.

Modern wooden floors have been laid to prevent dust being kicked up, so we can surmise that the chambers would have been choked with dust in ancient times. Furthermore, there are no soot marks from lamps, suggesting that they must have worked in complete darkness. 

So, in summary, Egyptologists would like us to believe that hundreds of people, crammed into cramped, dust-choked tunnels and working in complete darkness, managed to pull a 70 tonne box, turn it in the tight corridor and lower it, then centre it perfectly into a narrow niche. They repeated this feat twenty-four times.

Carving

Researchers have no idea how they were carved. Just cutting the boxes from the original bed would have been a massive challenge but to carve a solid chunk, without a single hairline crack, and then to shape it into a box, with such high precision, is simply astounding. 

The engineer, Christopher Dunn, author of The Giza Power Plant, asked a firm in the US if they could replicate a box out of one piece of granite. They told him that, even with an unlimited budget, they’d still require six separate pieces to construct it. Six pieces in this modern era of circular saws with industrial diamond tips but we are expected to believe that the ancients used copper tools to carve the boxes from a single block of stone. 

Dunn also points out that the inside corners of the boxes have an absurdly small radii of 4 mm – a pencil would fit snugly in the corner – when something closer to 600 mm would have looked just fine aesthetically. 

The additional difficulty, time and expense to achieve this tight a corner in hard, igneous rock is hard to fathom and why was it even necessary just to house a dead bull, albeit a divine one?

I promise you something else, the alignment instruments on display in the Luxor and Cairo museums are absolutely incapable of achieving this kind of accuracy, however proficient the ancient sculptors.

Polishing

Researchers have no idea how they were polished. I can confirm that the boxes still retain a strong reflective sheen, despite no recent polishing and multiple layers of dust. The shiny surface was clearly not the result of the traditional sand/water abrasive used in the era the Egyptologists claim these boxes were built. I have seen this combination used and it is certainly impressive but it does not come close to the sheen exhibited by each of the boxes. I honestly don’t think we could achieve as good a result with modern methods – such as an industrial polish and a machine using silicon carbide bricks. 

There is speculation that it must have been a result of the deployment of some kind of lost chemical formula. This is not least because, as some researchers have pointed out, and as I saw with my own eyes, you can actually see clear, hardened drops of an unknown residue on the base of some of the lids. 

The Russian website, Isida Project, states that the covers are not always perfect (some were apparently damaged and then polished over) but that the interiors are all perfect, level and smooth to an astonishing degree. At this point, you might ask why the interiors were polished at all, since, once the lids were on, nobody would have been able to see the perfectly flat and polished surfaces?

So, in summary, researchers have no real idea how the boxes were transported to the site, how they were positioned on site, how they were carved, or how they were polished. They also cannot answer why the boxes were constructed to such specifications, or what was inside them and it turns out they’ve also no idea about their real age either…

Why the boxes weren’t built when Egyptologists say they were…

Absurdly, the official dating is made from the engravings/inscriptions found on one of the boxes. The thing is, I’ve seen these hieroglyphs and, even to my untrained eye, you can see that they are crude and amateurish. They bear no resemblance at all to the beauty of the boxes’ construction and it is quite clear that they are NOT contemporary but added centuries later – how long after is simply not known. 

Do you really think if it were the same people who had the awesome capability to cut, move, shape and finish these boxes, that their hieroglyphic carving would have been so awful? Also, they surely would have engraved the hieroglyphs, then polished them, if they were contemporary. Yet, on the boxes, it is quite clear that the hieroglyphs have been carved into the polished surface and left unfinished. In addition, one can see that the tools used to carve these hieroglyphs were not capable of cutting a straight line, as there are several obvious examples of where the tool slipped on the impossibly hard surface. Yet we are expected to believe the same sculptors crafted 4 mm radii corners?

I’m afraid that there is just no conceivable way that dynastic Egyptians with copper/bronze chisels and stone hammers could have achieved the precision of these boxes, that our own modern machines and engineers would struggle to replicate today. As with many mysterious Egyptian artefacts, it is suggestive of a lost ancient technology, perhaps even superior to our own.

One further interesting fact is that the ancient Egyptians who tiled the niches worked around the boxes, suggesting that they did not even have the technology to move them, let alone build them. This is yet another reason to suggest that the boxes were not contemporary with the scratched hieroglyphics – since, at the time these were scratched on, they apparently could not even shift them!

In next week’s blog, Part 3, I’m going to tell you about the ‘official line’ of what Egyptologists claim was in the boxes (& why I think it’s nonsense), as well as taking a short diversion to consider a key historical character in the story of the Serapeum, Prince Khaemweset.