Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.
My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray,
James Harkin and Anna Chazinski and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order,
here we go.
Starting with you, Andy.
My fact is that in 1833 the Pyramid at Giza was almost dismantled by the Pasha of Egypt so
that he could use the stones to build a dam.
Wow.
That's brilliant.
That's amazing.
And why did he not do it in the end?
He was talked out of it.
Someone said he's sure you want to destroy the most ancient site in the world.
So this was in 1833 and it was when Egypt was Ottoman ruled so it wasn't a local Egyptian ruler exactly and he was called Muhammad Ali Pasha and he did a sort of cost benefit analysis or he commissioned one from a civil servant to see how much it would cost and the civil servant was a Frenchman and he thought maybe it wasn't a good idea for the pyramid to be destroyed.
And his name was Linol, Louis-Maurice Adolf Linol and he was really young,
it was one of his first jobs but I think the story goes that he thought maybe this isn't a great idea.
So he came up with this cost benefit analysis which said look,
this is going to be quite expensive and some of the stone isn't quite right and I know it's precut and I know that's really convenient obviously but maybe don't do it.
They did actually take some blocks, didn't they, from one of the pyramids?