There aren't any ancient ruins with crazy traps and riddles

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• slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That we know of.

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  • markz@suppo.fi ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah, maybe we should look into archeologists that never returned

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    • Diddlydee@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      This is 100% survivorship bias

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    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well the pyramids at Giza were said to be cursed. Turns out, it was just gross occupational safety violations, but the effect was largely the same. If you breathe a thousand year old pathogens, you’re going to get sick.

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  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Eh, the terracotta emporer from China almost definitely has booby traps that are likely still functional after 2,000.

    We don’t know, because the absolutely insane amount of open mercury in the tomb would have filled it with toxic gases, although it’s likely that wasn’t the intent.

    But yeah, most “ancient” tombs were pillaged centuries ago. What little happens now is entirely black market and people probably die all the time.

    I know Kim Kardashian took a booty selfie with a sarcophagus at the MET Gala a couple years ago, and one of the illegal tomb raiders recognized it. And because he never got his cut, he snitched to local authorities

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  • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’m surprised there hasn’t been a modern day person that buried their fortune with them under puzzles and traps.

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    • slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s what shell companies are for. Legally burry who owns the assets

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    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      We have a modern version of the deadly temple:

      This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.

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    • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      There was one! Look up Forrest Fenn - the podcast *Cautionary Tales has a double feature about it (S6E44-45). True riddles, and treasure hunts, and some deaths despite no traps being set.

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    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Tbf there’s that one tv show about that one island in canada or something that had buried treasure and a bunch of traps but then it turned out the treasure had already been found and they think a freed slave found it when he bought the island back in the day or something like that.

      Admittedly I’ve only seen one episode, a friend who watched it filled in the details on where it went lol.

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  • Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The ones with the traps succeeded in protecting their secrecy.

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• SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  For fun, here’s a link to the 10,000-year clock, built by The Long Now Foundation. The level of modern engineering, and planning, that it takes to build a clock that will operate for 10,000 years is fascinating. When you stop to think about, say, the trope of a mechanism that will slide back a 20-ton rock door reliably after 2,000 years is quite ridiculous.

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  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And then there are those secret doors where you pull a lever and the wall opens up on its own. What kind of mechanism would be reliable after all these years?

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    • athatet@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Sticky piston.

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  • PierceTheBubble@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    A large stone on a ramp, kept from rolling by a wedge, to be pushed out of position, by use of mechanical advantage through a lever, seems quite doable to me.

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  • umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    it says it can be scaled, i wonder if its 3d printable

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• sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Be the change you wish to see in the world

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  • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Step 1. Have money.

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    • sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Tragically

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    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Step 2. Hide the money

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• Greg@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Do you work for big-ancient-temples? It sounds like you’re just setting me up so that I end up in a pit of snakes or buried in lava.

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  • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Close. I work for big-pit-snakes. Who do you think supplies the ancient temples?

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    • ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You mean it isn’t the folks at trap-o-mart?

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• 474D@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  If it’s important enough for traps, it’s important enough to be hidden. They could just be hidden well enough

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  • Klear@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The real treasure were the traps we found along the way.

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• Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  There is one job that does what archeologist does in films: software engineers.

  You have to decipher ancient languages, riddles, and have to avoid traps all the times.
  Sure, you don’t go into deep jungle, but you sometimes get to dive into the deep web to find traces of documentations to help resolve a specific case.

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  • stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If your inline assembly is being rendered as ancient glyphs, please change your font.

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    • Hupf@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      relevant xkcd

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    • klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Two word horror story: Webdings mono

      shudder

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    • Dremor@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Or check your encoding. Happened to me. 😅

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• Hubi@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You’re gonna have to explore meth houses for that.

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• fizzle@quokk.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What do you mean “media”? As in movies?

  What you’re describing about “getting in” to places and “treasure” is a little old school. In the before times archaeology wasn’t really a thing and “antiquarians” looted old temples and tombs and sites. Their objective was to take objects which had some value.

  Archaeology’s primary motivation is to learn about places, the time they were active, and the people that were active in them. Obviously finding some beautiful object or treasure is exciting, but it’s so exceedingly rare that it’s not really a consideration.

  I quite like watching time team. They have a great youtube channel now but it was a BBS series for many years. I feel like this is probably about as real a depiction of “archaeology” as you’re going to get. They brush dirt away with a tiny paint brush for days and get excited when they find a tiny shard of pottery because it confirms that people were active at the site in say, the 1300s instead of the 1600s as previously thought.

  In the current era, archaeologists acknowledge that accessing ancient burials and similar sites is so destructive that there are instances where we know their probably is treasure and other wonders but decide to leave it. The most famous example is The Mausoleum of Qin Shi, protected by the Terracotta army. There are other similar examples.

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  • Hazmatastic@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    +1 for Time Team. Such a cool show, taught me a ton. My inner monologue now slips into a Yorkshire accent when I think about flint knapping

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  • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Movies, TV, comics, Video Games, books, etc. People in this thread have already named a few. But as you point out, archeology in reality is rarely what we see in mainstream entertainment.

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  • captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Exactly, treasure hunters go for the golden objects, and while archeologists absolutely want such things, they relate to what is valued, adornment styles, and often religion, but archeologists are often just as excited, if not moreso, to find the trash pit

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• northernlights@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wait, Lara Croft is not real? I’m devastated.

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  • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I refuse to believe dinosaurs aren’t alive in some tropical oasis surrounded by an elaborate and abandoned cave system with a functioning works, high up on the Peruvian mountains!

    Image

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• f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Lies. I saw that kid get carried off on a gurney, on Legends of the Hidden Temple.

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• Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  They set up all those blowgun traps but forgot they didn’t have the tech to actually make them blow just because a wooden lever was pulled.

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• TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Technically there have been ruins and tombs with traps and riddles. Take a look at some of the info about the Curse of Tutankhamun’s Tomb alone, including stuff like an anthropologist named Field having his house burn down, then flood after its rebuiling (purportedly because he had accepted a mummified hand as a paperweight which came with a cursed bracelet attached).

  Granted, there’s no Myst or Tomb Raider-style tomb puzzles unless you count translations of ancient dialects used by the original architects/artisans/scribes/etc., but a lot of death has been associated with burial sites/tombs, whether or not you attribute them to curses or long-dormant mould being disturbed and breathed in…

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  • NachBarcelona@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The “Curse of Tutankhamun”, are you for real 😂 that’s the dumbest shit right up there with Nostradamus’s propehcies and homeopathy.

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• jaschen306@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wasn’t there a pharaoh that had so much mercury on the site that anyone that tried to dig his grave would get mercury poisoning?

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  • flerbshmerd@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’m not sure about a pharaoh’s tomb, but there were rivers of mercury in the tomb of the first Emperor of China; also automatic crossbow traps I believe. It’s the tomb with the Terracotta Army. Extremely fascinating.

    1. https://www.futura-sciences.com/en/this-tomb-is-a-deadly-trap-archaeologists-still-refuse-to-open-it_17867/

    2. https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2020/01/rivers-and-seas-made-of-mercury-inside-the-tomb-of-chinas-first-emperor-sealed-2200-years-ago/

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• mr_might44@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  This guy clearly never visited Genghis Khan’s tomb.

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• umbrella@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  weren’t the pyramids, sort of?

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  • ApollosArrow@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There were sealed and have fake passages, but I don’t think there were traps.

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• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  What about your mom though?

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