Skatha wrote:

> Origyptian wrote:
>
> > painted stones worked by quarrymen. Meanwhile, I stated that I
> > thought it's too poorly carved to be official royal signage
> > (irregular stone fragment, top heavy instability, poor footing,
> > shallow engraving).
> >
>
> There is a third explanation that you may not be considering:
>
> Not all artists are of equal quality, even when they've been
> trained by a rather rigid system to produce a consistent
> product (as happened with the Egyptians.) In museums, we see
> that while workers from the royal workshops in royal cities
> produce what we think of as "beautiful Egyptian art", workers
> from smaller towns and provinces produced rougher, less
> beautiful work (and often made mistakes.) I've seen some
> pretty crude limestone talatats and offering stele produced
> from regions a hundred miles or more away from the royal
> cities.
>
> I think we can safely say that none of the kings' own royal
> artisans were at work on this one. It's of similar quality to
> art from some of the more remote provinces.
>
> For example, this statue fragment from the town of Qau, tomb of
> Wahakai, has some irregularities in a lot of the letters (the
> "n" (water-looking sign), and the sign for wab/purity) and is
> more of a deep incising scratch than an actual
> carved-with-a-chisel look.)
> [www.ucl.ac.uk]

Form my perspective, the Wahakai engraving is gorgeous and is clearly more geometrically precise than the engraving on the Khufu Stela. Also, it clearly was originally on a larger block that has since fragmented thereby leaving behind a few partial glyphs that were part of a larger narrative that was broken off. The top edge is deliberately straight and smooth and follows the engraved framing. This gives us reason to believe the original Wahakai block was a geometrically neat block.

Not so, for the Khufu Stela. Unlike the Wahakai stone, the Stela's engravings barely scratch the surface and are clearly less precise, and it shows no signs of having been engraved before the block was fragmented. Rather, the block fragment appears to have been polished first and then engraved AFTER fragmentation. The only apparent straight edge on that stone is the short bottom surface which was buried about 10" into the ground.

I agree that none of the king's royal artisans worked on the Khufu Stela.