Audrey wrote:

> How do you figure pillagers got the casing down from the higher
> courses? Don't you see that as a major problem considering the
> weight?

They wanted only the fine tura limestone casing.

Getting it down was probably quite easy once they worked their way up the most badly damaged corner. When they began dismantling the casing it was badly damaged by an earthquake and Cairo lay in ruins because of the earthquake. They picked the worst corner (probably the SW) and merely wanted to get to the top. This probably involved removing many stones in their path. This was dangerous and there would have been injuries and probably fatalities. But one they got to the top it was extremely easy to just pry these stones off. Men would wait below to remove fallen stone which had slid dowm the still partially cladded pyramid and fallen to the soft sand below. Once a row was started the stones would pop out relatively easily. As the men were working below to remove the last few stones taken out they could walk to a different working surface and pop stones out there. A single team of about twenty men should be able to remove 50 stones per day with many of them intact and virtually undamaged. You can see on the G2 pictures that the earthquake did a lot of damage to the facing of each stone but this had to be trimmed off anyway for reuse.