Randall Carlson

Okay, so...

You probably know that at one time, this very high, called indurated limestone, formed the casing stones.

The whole pyramid was sheathed in this high-density white limestone.

And then 675 years ago, I think is the...

rough date of it, give or take a decade or two, there was a great earthquake that was centered over roughly under where Crete is now in the Mediterranean.

And for, you know, thousands of years, people were not able to penetrate the

the casing of the Great Pyramid because the joinery was so exquisitely tight.

They couldn't get anything in there to leverage it.

But when this earthquake happened, it apparently dislodged a couple of stones.

casing stones at the same time that it caused the collapse of a whole bunch of buildings in Cairo.

So the people were in desperate need of building stone.

And oh, I forget the guy's name, Makum.

Oh, I don't remember his name.

He was the Mahdi at the time.

And he said, well, we'll just use casing stones from the pyramid.

And so they stripped

This white limestone, you can kind of see up here the stepped stone.

That's also limestone, but it's a much lower quality limestone.

Now, here's what I'm going to call your attention to.

Before they actually started construction of the pyramid proper, they produced this perfectly level limestone base here that you can see on the bottom.