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This is what the pyramids used to look like. They were covered with polished white limestone and had a peak made of pure gold.
(lemmy.today)
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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From what I understand the polished limestone is accurate for many pyramids, but the gold pyramidion seems to be more of an edge case on some smaller pyramids.
A gold top wouldn’t even be visible from the ground on a large polished white pyramid.
If it was capped in gold, dusk and dawn could have been very pretty.
I remember the signs there and museum did tell that the great pyramids also had golden Pyramidions.
The point of pyramids was of religious nature, it was to be closer to the sky and allow dead pharaohs to go in their version of the after life so it's likely that the gold wasn't to be pretty but for a religious something
Also, i wonder if it was really gold or something else because gold was and is expensive as fuck, maybe a gold alloy
If it was for religious reasons they would definitely use pure gold
Just looked on wikipedia and they say
"... and were sometimes covered with plates of copper, gold or electrum." (electrum is an alloy of gold and silver IIRC)
Which makes a lot of sense, gold was and is very expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramidion
"Plates of" especially makes sense. And you do recall correctly, electrum is a natural alloy, which means they wouldn't have had to create it from scratch.