> It is hard to believe later generations were always just too impatient to bother doing top quality work.
I very much feel that this is an exact mirror of what we see today in modern construction: simpler, _cheaper_ materials, less time-intensive work to reduce the cost of construction. As time progressed in Ancient Egypt, people might have had different perceptions of what was desirable in construction of these landmarks. Perhaps the political will as lacking to keep building vast, high quality landmarks, or perhaps the pharaos found out building something for three decades is risky since you don't know if you will live that long.
Perhaps ancients had a similar ratio of high quality and mostly low quality. It’s just that the only pieces that survived are the very large high quality rocks, all of their quick cheap stuff broke up quickly.
Exactly. If they could still do high-quality work: mirror-smooth surfaced, extra-hard diorite, carved with exact bilateral symmetry, you would expect to find some of it done for highest-status people, even if it were no longer squandered on huge monuments.
That does not account for the entire lack of late, smaller, top-grade work. So, maybe 100-ton mirror-smooth columns no longer impress. Not making anything mirror-smooth, at any scale, or anything 100 tons even if no smooth, really calls into question whether you still can.
Maybe they ran a financial pyramid and the music stopped. Funding had ran out. Interest rates went up. Rampant inflation. People can’t feed themselves, no one cares about smooth rocks anymore. They just want a sandwich and a roof.
Sure, maybe they couldn't because the techniques had been lost which we know is a thing that happens, or maybe they chose not to. Or maybe aliens. This is basically a god of the gaps argument, we don't know so therefore let's fill the gap with the wackiest made up fantasy crap we can think of. Well ok, if you like but it's basically just entertainment and nothing to do with reality.
Nobody suggested they were not made by Egyptians. You made that up, too.
We don't know which generation of Egyptians did the top quality work. As already noted, inscriptions only establish a lower bound on age, but no upper bound. Evidence strongly suggests the means to do such work were lost, early on.
"Machined" describes the precision of the work. If you know how to get that without precision equipment, reveal it.
I very much feel that this is an exact mirror of what we see today in modern construction: simpler, _cheaper_ materials, less time-intensive work to reduce the cost of construction. As time progressed in Ancient Egypt, people might have had different perceptions of what was desirable in construction of these landmarks. Perhaps the political will as lacking to keep building vast, high quality landmarks, or perhaps the pharaos found out building something for three decades is risky since you don't know if you will live that long.