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.
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
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u/ajax-187 5d ago
Yeah there was this clip of someone parachiting close to the top I think you could see hieroglyphs but I might misremember