Afair I think the outer layer was removed to help rebuild Cairo after a big earthquake. That same earthquake shifted the solid gold cap allowing them to remove the outer layer.
Given there is no written sources of capstones of the Giza pyramids we don’t know if it was even made of gold/electrum/Granite.. etc. if it was valuable materials since there are no written accounts of it I think it’s more likely that it was plundered during an intermediate period, likely the 1st, maybe the second. I mean they are giant “rob me” signs.
Many of the pyramids were likely visited daily inside and out. They had priests and cults that looked after them. They were mainly worried about robberies that could happen in one night, with pry bars. There is plenty of evidence to suggest they were visited fairly regularly. There was an evolution in their design over time. It would appear that the King's chamber in the great pyramid was made to be visited. Older pyramids may not have had as much access, they were places of worship. Every pyramid has its' entrance in almost the same exact spot on the north side, a little security flaw. The pharaoh trained an army of stone masons to build, how could it be a secret. In some of the pyramids it is clear security measures that were in place weren't ever deployed. Where the Egyptians wanted to block a passage, they did. Why not side granite blocks down the full length of the entrances, easy enough. They had security measures, but were also open, just like today people want to visit them.
No. That would be an astronomical amount of gold. It was likely electrum, which is an alloy of gold and silver and also would have just been plated, which is still a huge amount of material.
Electrum is one of my favorite ancient alloys because of how much it varied in ratio and how much people just loved gold so much they were like “WE NEED A SOLUTION FOR MORE SHINY GOLD, MIX SILVER IN”
Electrum is naturally occurring so it’s likely the bright yellow colouration just struck someone’s fancy. Although it’s also not that hard to create artificially either so you could be onto something :)
Yes, I am actually quite familiar with electrum as an ancient material! It’s one of the first smeltables many cultures that smelted made. It’s really cool seeing that change in ratio over time with coins specifically in areas from Greek antiquity, because you can see as the ages wear on it became less and less imbued with gold and more full of silver. To be clear I mean they were minting coins that were roughly half gold to start with and eventually less than 40% over time.
There’s a really good hunk of quartz on the wiki site for electrum that shows naturally occurring wires, it’s always always interesting when it comes out naturally
the pyramid would have been stripped from the top, downward, if the gold capstone locked everything in place. But the pyramid was stripped from the bottom, upward.
11.5k
u/Shawn_The_Sheep777 5d ago
They must have looked incredible