Like the Pyramid of Khafre, the same syenite casing stones are found on the exterior of the Pyramid of Menkaure.
The absence of these casing stones from the upper courses could be explained by scavengers who wanted free material (and had a means of carting it away) but removing them from these heights is needlessly difficult and dangerous - particularly when blocks can be much more easily levered out from the ground-level corners.
It's instead possible that what's seen at the Pyramid of Khafre also applies here: Someone was in the process of preserving this ancient structure and for some reason never finished. If true, this would place the age of these pyramids far further back in time than academia is currently prepared to acknowledge.
The Pyramid of Menkaure may be small compared to Khafre and Khufu but there are other questions regarding these syenite casing stones - and establishing exactly what happened here, in what order, is a very big mystery.
