isn’t it true that the pyramids used to be covered in smooth white granite with the very top capstone covered in gold?
That musta been awesome to see
The facing stones were white limestone, with a pyramidon at the summit of the pyramid. The facing stones had inscriptions carved into them here and there, and since there’s no trace of the stone at Giza, presumably the inscriptions could still exist in medieval structures in Cairo, with the inscribed face turned inward where it wouldn’t show.
Some idea of how it looked can be seen on the upper reaches of the Khafre pyramid. Removing the facing stones from Khufu may not have been as difficult as it may seem, even assuming the Great Pyramid was, after all, completed. A small crew would have had to climb the smooth face, then pried off the topmost blocks, which could have been allowed to slide all the way down, or laboriously lowered by ropes, perhaps using two blocks, one down each side, to counter the weight of each other (iow, a pulley system, so the crew wouldn’t lose footing and get pulled down the face).