Underground gallery complex at Saqqara built for the burial of the Apis bulls, in use from the New Kingdom into the Ptolemaic period and rediscovered by Auguste Mariette in 1850. Its Greater Vaults hold twenty-four granite and basalt boxes cut from single blocks, each weighing on the order of seventy tonnes with lids of a further twenty-five or so.
Why it is in the technology argument
The boxes are the exhibit Christopher Dunn uses hardest after Core No. 7. He reports that a steel parallel ground flat within two ten-thousandths of an inch finds no light gap along their interior surfaces, and reads the flatness, the sharp interior corners and the sheer scale as the signature of machine work rather than hand finishing.
What the claim rests on
The light-gap test is qualitative and Dunn’s dial indicator broke in transit, so no instrumented survey backs the space-age precision verdict; that is stated in the source note on The Giza Power Plant on this site. The boxes are genuinely remarkable objects, they are conventionally dated, and the manufacturing question they raise is real and separate from the power-plant thesis built on top of it.
Connections
Christopher Dunn · The Giza Power Plant · Ancient Machining · Core No. 7 · Auguste Mariette · Great Pyramid of Giza · Denys Stocks · Piezoelectric Granite