Electrum in Egyptian Sacred Architecture

Egyptian builders capped pyramids and obelisks with electrum, most famously the small pyramidion, the capstone that crowned a pyramid's peak. Amenemhat III's pyramidion at Dahshur is among the surviving examples, and obelisk tips were finished the same way, so that the very top of the monument, the point that first and last caught the sun, was faced in a metal pale enough to gleam rather than the duller gold-red of gold alone. Some later esoteric readings of Egyptian metal use interpret the electrum cap as a union of the solar principle carried by gold and a lunar or reflective principle carried by silver, though this is a modern gloss on the practice rather than a claim the Egyptian sources themselves make explicit, and the atlas records it as such.

Electrum also appears in temple fittings, ritual vessels and personal ornament throughout the Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Mycenaean worlds, valued for a brilliance distinct from either of its parent metals and for the fact that a naturally occurring alloy needed no smith's skill to combine, only the skill to work it once found.