I looked all over for a date and got everything from “early 1800s” to “late 1800s” but nothing exact, so I had to make an educated guess. The first cameras practical enough to take such a photo were developed around 1840 and the excavations began in 1867.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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    14 hours ago

    Yeah, that’s just a myth. There’s also the claim that Napoleon’s soldiers shot it off. The truth is we don’t know when it happened for sure. Medieval Muslim writers claimed it was done deliberately in the 13th century to stop the locals from worshiping it instead of Allah, but we don’t even know if that is true. It’s very possible it fell off long before that just due to structural flaws.