The nature of a tool defines the job it can do.
Modern science creates technology, not through understanding but through the ability to take things from the lab and adapt them to other uses. When you discover that electricity creates magnetism you can invent an instrument to measure current and use the instrument to study electricity. This naturally spawns more experiment, more instruments, and more technology.
Natural science doesn't work this way. Animals and ancient man didn't perform experiment because it is outside the metaphysics of natural science. They would say that you can't stage or cheat 'amun". Ancient metaphysics was pretty simple but it looks nothing like our metaphysics. They took reality as being axiomatic as was time and cause and effect. They probably used a cardinal mathematics but no one yet understands it. Observation and theory makes prediction and these were confirmed by observation and logic.
"Observation" is fundamental to modern science but ALL theory can ONLY be established through experiment. This is because we have no test to confirm the interpretation of observation. Some people here are misunderstanding the nature of observation in modern science. You can't look at a bone and pronounce it an early form of another bone therefore species must evolve. All you can logically say is that the two individuals represent a species that changed. Just as it's illogical to say that the ruins of a building must have been a temple where people prayed to imaginary consciousnesses therefore they were superstitious. Observation is about proper interpretation of experiment and hypothesis formation. It is most assuredly not "science" even though observation is fundamental to modern science, ancient science, and the ability of every individual that has ever lived to survive. Observation is very similar to survival itself except in modern science.
Modern science creates technology. Ancient science created understanding. From this understanding sprang technology. This is why ancient technology appears "simple" by our standards. Of course no one knows how the great pyramid builders drilled and shaped granite and they don't even know how they lifted the stones to build pyramids since ramps were debunked 7 years ago. Indeed, we don't know much of anything about their technology except that we are still dependent on their invention of agriculture which was derived from their theory of species change.
Meanwhile
actual reality of tombs with grave goods and skeletons uncovered in Hierakonpolis from predynastic Naquada 2 period showing the continuous development of the Egyptian civilization upto the Old Kingdom peak.
Special Report: New Finds from the Elite Cemetery - Archaeology Magazine Archive
Completion of the work at Tomb 23 took place this past February-March. The area Adams had investigated was reopened and the adjacent areas excavated, showing that the tomb--the largest of this date known so far--measured 5.5 meters (east-west) by 3 meters (north-south). On the stone floor of the tomb, at its western end, were the partial remains (lower skeletal parts only) of four individuals. The remains are not well preserved and had no grave goods with them or mats (with which other bodies in the cemetery are wrapped, laid upon, or covered). While evidence indicates that the tomb was plundered more than once in the past, Adams had found fine grave offerings at the tomb's eastern end.
Eight square posts (20 by 20 cm), indicated by four postholes on each of the tomb's long sides, supported the superstructure over it. East of the tomb, six additional posts (set in two north-south rows of three each) may be from a one- or two-room offering chapel, the walls of which were made from matting.
To the west of the tomb was another grave, Tomb 25, which held remains of three adults with textile wrapping and padding and layers of matting covering them. Postholes at each corner suggest that Tomb 25 also had a superstructure. Although Tomb 25 seems to be later than Tomb 23, it is within a wall enclosing the entire complex and is part of the whole.
On the northeast, there is a gap in the wall--likely the entrance to the complex--flanked by large postholes in one of which were ritual vessels fragments and bones of a newly born sheep or goat. Another deposit, between the enclosure's northeastern corner and the entrance, held a ram's head flaked from flint, in the same fashion as the ibex found by Adams in 2000, and mace handle of ebony.
In 2000, Adams found more than
500 fragments of a near life-size statue, and 46 more pieces of it were recovered this season. This degree of fragmentation suggests that the destruction of the statue was deliberate. The enclosure wall and superstructure over Tomb 23 were both burnt, but exactly when this happened and if it is related to the destruction of the statue remain unknown.
Royal elephant buried in honor in these tombs as well.
Interactive Dig Hierakonpolis - The Elite Cemetery: Week 5
It was not until we finally got to the floor of the grave in the test square in the central depression that we could answer some of these questions, at least in part. The floor was reached at 1.15 m below the surface, and it was an amazing sight. On it lay three large bones that essentially filled the entire space, leaving little room for the workmen, and certainly no room for a basket boy or, frustratingly, an Egyptologist. I watched from the side of the trench as they gradually revealed the articulated front leg of the elephant, part of the massive pelvis, and a shoulder bone that had been knocked out of place. I could also make out a dark stain spreading across the floor and the bones. When I could take it no longer, I jumped in to examine it: a fine linen fabric both above and below the bones. Sandwiched between these gossamer layers was a thick layer of blackened elephant skin, in some cases still adhering to the bones.
Clearly at least part of the elephant had been laid in its grave with its skin still on its bone. The recovery of a substance that looked like bone but felt like soap told us that it still had its flesh as well, as this mysterious substance later was identified as elephant blubber! (Technically, it is adipocere, a wax-like substance that fatty tissue chemically changes into under certain conditions.)
It was also clear that this elephant had been buried with honors and not, for example, as a food offering. The sheer quantity of fabric required to cover an elephant was hard to fathom. But that was not all. It was also provided with grave gifts of red ocher and green malachite (a copper ore) used as eye make up, a diorite macehead, an alabaster jar, amethyst bead, and, perhaps a tad tastelessly, an ivory bracelet! His pottery grave goods included fine black-topped beakers, a bowl decorated with white paint, and a jar imported from Maadi, a predynastic site near modern Cairo. Clearly no expense had been spared. On a more somber note, it is hard to know whether the number of transverse arrowheads (hafted at the pointed end) found in the grave debris were grave goods for the elephant's afterlife, or the items that dispatched him hence.
Interactive Dig Hierakonpolis - Hierakonpolis 2007 - Field Note 6
When we returned to the cemetery,
we knew the tomb was going to be big, but full excavation exceeded our initial expectations when Tomb 23, turned out to be the largest tomb of its time period (c. 3800BC, Naqada IIAB) yet known. Measuring 5.5m long by over 3.1m wide, it is approximately the same size as the Painted tomb, but can be dated by associated pottery some 300 years earlier. That it can comfortably seat the entire excavation crew give perhaps even a better idea of its substantial size.
On the east side of the grave, posts also survive to indicate a separate above-ground structure, which we call an offering chapel, for lack of a better term. In addition to these buildings,
hundreds of evenly spaced smaller post marked out an imposing enclosure wall that is 16m long and 9m wide and was originally, at least in part, painted a deep red. Completely unexpected, it presages the funerary precincts of mud brick known in the First Dynasty over half a millennium later.
See more in the link below
Interactive Dig Hierakonpolis - Hierakonpolis 2007 - Field Note 6
All of this clearly shows that the Egyptian religion and beliefs regarding Gods, afterlife and elaborate burial and veneration of elites and kings were established 500 years before the 1st dynasty. Care to explain these?
