![]() Fitting, given that he was the first to unify all of China (“Qin” is where we get “China”): it’s hard to imagine a more important historical figure, nor one more able to command incredible resources to construct what is possibly the world’s most magnificent, and certainly its most well guarded, tomb. Rumors have been flying about the content of it for 150 years, ranging from pirate treasure to Marie Antoinette’s jewels to lost Shakespeare manuscripts and more, and while no actual treasure has been found, layer upon layer of flood-inducing booby traps, seemingly man made, along with what appear to be coded messages, has given generation after generation of treasure seekers hope.īut by far the greatest trapped tomb has got to be that of Qin Shi Huang. Perhaps the most storied supposed cache of treasure in North America is the Oak Island Money Pit, a long vertical shaft dug in the wet island soil. Arnoldo Cruz and his team of archaeologists had to be top notch to avoid poisoning themselves when they opened the sarcophagus and saw it for the first time, with no warning. The deadly paint covered not just their bones, which it had seeped into, but also all of the jade, pearls, and other treasures in there with her. Their bones had been painted red with cinnabar – a deadly neurotoxin. But that wasn’t the trap: the trap was what was waiting inside their sarcophagi. The stairway from the altar to their death chamber was filled in with rocks and then sealed with another false floor, and when discovered it took years to unearth. ![]() These two Maya nobles were entombed in the base of two separate pyramidal temples. Red, being the color of blood, was of paramount importance to the sanguine Maya – it colored nearly all of their buildings, much of their clothing, and in the case of the Red Queen and Lord Pacal, their bones. In another jungle pyramid, but half a millenia earlier, one of the most dramatic traps of all time was being set in the tomb of the Red Queen of Palenque. The reclining Buddha on the Baphuon, reconstructed It’s got the reclining Buddha statue, only now the entire thing is reinforced with metal throughout. It wasn’t until 400 years later in 1960 when it was reassembled, and it wasn’t opened to the public until 2011. But the stones removed were not as ornamental as they seemed: they held back a massive wall of sand, which flooded out, destroying the reclining Buddha and the entire western side of the pyramid. Originally dedicated to Shiva when it was built in the 11th century, the 16m bronze and stone altar at the top was disassembled and turned into a statue of the reclining Buddha, on the west side of the second story. No collapsing temple from real life exemplifies this trope more than the enormous Baphuon, 34m (111) tall in its ruined state, 50m tall in its glory. One of the greatest tropes in all of fiction is the temple that, when desecrated, dramatically collapses. In a similarly hot, pyramid filled environment, but much wetter and 2500 years later, one of my favorite trapped buildings of all time was being constructed: the mighty Baphuon in the Khmer Empire’s capital of Angkor, in what is now modern day Cambodia. People living nearby were paid in perpetuity to replace the false floors as they were activated.Ī map of Amenhotep III’s tomb. But before any treasure seekers could even get to the false wall, they had to deal with a much more dangerous trap: a false floor concealing a deadly pit trap! A 6 meter (20 foot) drop down a featureless shaft was basically a death sentence for anyone unlucky enough to get fall in, unless they had some good friends getting them out. In reality, the false wall on the back hid a passage leading to the rest of the tomb. The tomb of Amenhotep III appeared to end in a relatively nicely adorned room with some moderate amount of treasure that was worth stealing. But the Pharaohs didn’t rely on supernatural protection alone: they also arranged for more mechanical means of defense. There are curses the world over, but none is more famous than the mummy’s curse, inscribed on doorways and statues warning would-be graverobbers of death by snakes, scorpions, and crocodile. See where the false wall has been removed on the right
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