{"it":{"id":"W21LA05","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","name":"Djedefra quartzite heads (2 Louvre, 1 Cairo)","place":"Paris","mat":"quartzite","dims":"not given","loc":"Louvre / Egyptian Museum Cairo","acc":"not given","find":"Abu Roash","flag":"genuine ancient","src":[198,502],"lat":48.861,"lon":2.336,"tags":[],"sum":"Traces of red paint still cling to it. This head of King Djedefre wears the royal nemes headcloth and the cobra on the brow, and it is cut from silicified sandstone, the hard stone usually called quartzite.\n\nIt stands 26.5 cm high, 33.5 cm wide and 28.8 cm deep. Émile Chassinat excavated it in 1900 to 1901 at Djedefre's funerary complex at Abu Rawash, north of Giza, and it reached the Louvre in 1907. The Louvre dates it to the king's reign, about 2605 to 2597 BC.\n\nWhat is hard to explain, for some, is the face: calm, balanced and smooth, carved in a very hard stone.\n\nThe engineer Christopher Dunn has written that he does not know of any hand-carved statues with the precision and symmetry of the best Egyptian work, and he proposes that faces like these were machined and then finished by hand. Petrie's study of Egyptian stoneworking answers him: cutting points of very hard stone, probably corundum, can shape hard rock under heavy pressure, and symmetry is what any trained royal workshop aims for. No one has published measurements of this head that would show a machine and not a hand (single source).\n\nThe open question is how an early royal workshop reached such control in so hard a stone, and what tools it left behind that we have not yet found.","why":"A royal portrait in one of the hardest stones the Egyptians carved, with museum facts and the symmetry claim side by side.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Check left-right symmetry.","rel":["EGY-ABR"],"hook":"A red quartzite head of King Djedefre, 26.5 cm tall. Christopher Dunn calls such faces too even for hands."},"S":{"198":["Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs (Bear & Co 2010, ISBN 978-1-59143-102-2); printed-page refs","file:books/upload5.pdf"],"502":["Wikipedia: Djedefre","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djedefre"]},"rec":{"id":"W21LA05","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"precision portraiture","mainstream_reading":"royal sculpture (not opened)","provenance_flag":"genuine ancient","current_location":"Louvre / Egyptian Museum Cairo","find_circumstances":"Abu Roash","claimant":"Christopher Dunn","status":"no data","dimensions":"not given","material":"quartzite","date":"","culture":"","museum_accession":"not given","b":"S","s":["W21LS01"]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W21LS01","t":"Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs (Bear & Co 2010, ISBN 978-1-59143-102-2); printed-page refs","u":"file:books/upload5.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Wikipedia: Djedefre","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djedefre"},{"id":"VW21LA05-3","t":"Louvre collections: Head of Djedefre","u":"https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010007230"},{"id":"VW21LA05-4","t":"Brandon Ellis, Medium: The ancients built gigantic power plants (believer page)","u":"https://medium.com/@brandonellis_25067/the-ancients-built-gigantic-power-plants-f7761c803114"},{"id":"VW21LA05-5","t":"Petrie 1883, Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, ch. 19: mechanical methods of the pyramid builders","u":"https://www.ronaldbirdsall.com/gizeh/petrie/c19.html"}],"qs":["Egyptian sculptors used grids for faces. Can strict rules explain symmetry that looks machine-made?","Nobody has published scans of this head. What would a fair test of the machine claim look like?","What would change about the story of the pyramids if sculptors had tools we have not found?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/W21LA05-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Djedefra quartzite heads (2 Louvre, 1 Cairo), Paris","by":"Shonagon","lic":"CC0","lu":"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T%C3%AAte_de_Djedefr%C3%AA_-_Mus%C3%A9e_du_Louvre_Antiquit%C3%A9s_%C3%A9gyptiennes_E_12626.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"not given","h":"Recorded dimensions","s":[269]},{"v":"Quartzite","h":"Made of","s":[269]},{"v":"Abu Roash","h":"Where it was found","s":[269]}],"hs":{"269":["Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs (Bear & Co 2010, ISBN 978-1-59143-102-2); printed-page refs","file:books/upload5.pdf"]}}