The sultan who tried to destroy the pyramids

The  pyramids are the greatest testament of egyptian engineering, a work so advanced for its time and so spectacular that sometimes to give us an  idea of the context of the same it is useful to remember that  chronologically Cleopatra is closer to our days than to the construction of the pyramids. In fact, the Ptolemaic Queen was born about 2,085 years ago, more precisely in January of the year 69 a. C. in Alexandria. However, the  Great Pyramid of Giza was built during the 4th Dynasty, about  4,600 years ago, which distance the Great Pyramid of Cleopatra in about  2,515 years. 

While they are a wonder, not everyone thought the same, especially an Islamic  extremist who set himself the task of destroying the pyramids for being  "instruments of idolatry". This extremist was Al-Aziz Uthman, Sultan of Egypt and the second son of Saladin, famous for fighting against Richard the Lionheart during the Third Crusade in the 12th century. 

Al-Aziz began to destroy smaller pyramids, he ordered his men to remove the base stones from them. Later  it began to deal with the medium pyramids, damaging the pyramid of  Menkauro, which fortunately did not collapse but it was left with a strip or gap in one of its faces product of the removal of stones. According to counts of the time the works lasted eight months, and the biggest problem with which the contracted miners were found for this task was  that in addition to the hard work of removing the stones, in doing so they fell burying in the sand what it took to That access to the face was increasingly difficult. In fact, those responsible for destroying the pyramid were those who told  the capricious leader that the destruction of it would be as costly as construction. 

Damage in the pyramid of Menkaure 

However, the Sultan was not content with attacking the smaller pyramids and his  goal was to destroy the greatest of all: the Great Pyramid of Gizah. Al-Aziz then began to raise funds and recruit a true army of workers to realize this end. For several months the workers tried all sorts of techniques to remove the  big and heavy stones of the Great Pyramid, only being able to remove  fractions of some stones located in one of the vertices. The  talent of the egyptian engineers was more than the fanaticism of the extremist, and during those months Al-Aziz squandered so much money to only cause a tiny damage that ended completely abandoning his idea of destroying the pyramids, fortunately for us. 

Images from Wikipedia