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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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Bright white casing stones, yes. 50 foot tall gold capstone, no.
Actual capstone in Cairo museum
Note, this is from the ruined Black Pyramid, no the Great Pyramid. But what a remarkable artifact, still amazingly intact.
This is in the right community. It is indeed interesting as fuck.
A bit ironic that they removed their comment that was remarkable and interesting. I guess it was about the capstone from Black Pyramid?
They posted an image of this capstone with the text "actual capstone in the Cairo museum."
It is a genuine capstone, or pyramidion, from a pyramid, one of very few that survives intact to the present day. It's black basalt, still beautifully polished and inscribed. It's just not from the Giza pyramids, it's from the Black pyramid at Dahshur, tomb of Amenemhat III. This is 12th dynasty, centuries later than the 4th dynasty necropolis at Giza, but it does give us an idea of what the pyramidion of Khufu's pyramid might have been like. Knowing Khufu, his was probably granite. He had a thing for granite, the entire King's Chamber of his pyramid is lined with it.
The article I linked doesn't give any sense of scale, Amenemhat's pyramidion is 1.85 meters tall and weighs 4.5 metric tons. No problem for the mega masons that built the rest of the actual manmade mountain it would rest upon, but still a far cry from a 100 foot tall chunk of gold.
Humans own 23m³ of gold total
Humans have mined more than 200000 metric tons of gold, which is about 10000 cubic meters, not 23
Whoops. 23³ m³
23 cubed cubic metres? Why not just put a few zeroes in the first place?
I guess, because that way it easier conveys the point of ‘it's a cube with 23 meters side’, which makes sense as it's easier to imagine than just an arbitrary amount of cubic meters.
Correct. Cube 23m on each side. I think I meant to write (23m)³ but forgot the parentheses.
Most of it's used in tech so how much of it is owned and not licensed? 🤔
Very little gold is used in tech