If you’ve seen the show Relic Hunter, you already know it’s campy, a bit pulpy, and plays rather fast and loose with actual history. (*Cough cough understatement cough.*)
Even so, there’s a particularly interesting alternate-history aspect in the show that deserves a second look. That’s the ongoing presence through their history of tombs, traps, and riddles that all work to the present day.
…Yes, yes, Bamboo Technology, videogame logic, etc. I know, I know. But think about it from a worldbuilding perspective. What would the story world need to be like for this to work?
Well, for starters, to keep all the traps live and functional, some kind of magic/mystical force absolutely exists. That’s pretty much quietly explicit in the ‘verse, where we’ve seen aging curses, people possessed by evil weapons or once-trapped spirits, and plants growing underground for centuries. (Yes, they said it was an ancient nuclear reactor instead, radiation and all. Still.)
After that we have a couple more subtle but no less world-changing differences. First, cultures around the world are much more focused on building elaborate traps, creating riddles, and scattering clues for the future. Second, and in-universe almost certainly related, we have academics who have made a far more extensive collection of lore, symbols, and knowledge of traps, such that an academic assistant like Nigel Bailey – not even a Ph.D. yet! – can not only recall the different traps he’s likely to find in a pyramid shaft, he can recognize them fast enough to not get skewered.
Granted, there probably aren’t that many assistants like Nigel. Sydney wouldn’t have hired him if he didn’t have the expertise. But still. Such knowledge exists.
And traps imply trap-builders. Across the world, in every culture, in every time period up to and possibly including the modern age. That is an interesting field of knowledge to have in your cultural background. It potentially implies less habits of attack and offense, and much more territorial defense strategies. Wars and warfare might look very different!
Unless, of course, traps are meant for the dead and relics, while the living are expected to protect themselves.
At the least I’d expect graveyards to be a different experience. Sure, most people would still have plain graves, but the rich wouldn’t have mausoleums. They’d have labyrinths!
…Actually they’d probably have both. The mausoleum would either be the entrance to the labyrinth or a fake-out to distract from the real one. Either way, interring the deceased or visiting the dearly departed to talk things over might be a bit more hazardous than we’re used to. So theoretically having an ethical relic hunter might be along the lines of the Safecracker of Last Resort. We think something important is in there, we just don’t have the skills to get it ourselves. Help?
Most relic hunters still ought to be on wanted posters, though. Especially if it’s known disturbing the dead has consequences! Like that time our pair unleashed a demon….
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
Necromancers are hired as gravekeepers and guards, some of them even live there. For some of them, it’s not just a life-long vocation… and they take a very dim view of people trying to rob their quiet neighbors. Or interrupting their own dirt nap, in some cases.
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The main question I keep running into is “why is this puzzle solvable?”
Why does the riddle actually lead to the correct answer?
Why is there a selection of tools ready to be used in the exact way required?
Why is the key hidden under a rock right by the door?
Is there some sens of “fair play” where if someone jumps through the right hoops they have a right to the treasure?
Is it some kind of “break glass in case of emergency” situation? If so, what keeps people from using it for some trivial emergency? What allows them to succeed in a real emergency?
***
The next question is how do they prevent cheating?
I mean, 90% of video game puzzles could be solved instantly with a 10′ pole with a hook on the end.
Or digging in the back door.
Or just systematically trying all solutions.
***
Combining those leads you to some weird head-spaces.
“I will make a series of lethal traps… to help people.”
“This is too dangerous to exist, but I can’t destroy it. So I will place it in this vault where if anyone accesses it, it will be destroyed.”
“I will make a trap to kill anyone digging in the ground.”
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“I mean, 90% of video game puzzles could be solved instantly with a 10′ pole with a hook on the end.”
:remembers one too many times trying to use a thin pole trying to get something in real life, it taking forever to accomplish or failing utterly, and grumbles that it probably *would* work in a video game because the dang pole won’t wobble like it would in real life, doggone it:
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Not only that, but all the switches work perfectly, all the blocks slide easily, all the tracks are clear, everything connects correctly.
I’ve had more trouble replacing a light switch than any game puzzle ever.
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There’s basically two things.
One is something like reliability.
Another includes decay, wear, and so forth.
A mechanism can be thought of as one chunk of a fancier machine, or a mechanical system. Reliability of one element that theoretically has two states, is going to be a bit dependent on materials, shape, precise details of fit, etc. If it wiggles, in practice it will not be switching between two states, but two sets of states. The states in each set may be similar, but teeny tiny differences between can have significant impact on interactions with the bigger system. Also, if the fit has or develops issues, it may get stuck between states. This is why reliability is statistical, and a combination of all the bits.
Cinematic traps tend to store a lot of energy, which is pretty seriously questionable over long times. Furthermore, over long times the trigger realistically would either have a false positive, or fail and always be negative.
As Vathara says, the answer is magic.
Which also explains why the puzzles can be worked out, or why the game mechanics work. That is the cost of the magic that would otherwise protect the site.
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See anyone who’s tried to use a pole hook to get fruit snared, yes…
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Red Herring, maybe. If they are too busy trying to get through the puzzles to get at a key for the vault, they aren’t paying attention to the paperweight on the fireplace mantle.
Possibly enclosure enrichment for the builders. Hey, you spend years building this one rich idoit’s tomb and see how bored you get.
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“I decoded the messages on the wall!”
“What do they say?”
“Hmm, ‘Bob loves Sally.’ ‘I am sick of sand.’ ‘Roast lizards are delicious.’ This one appears to be a tic-tac-toe game.”
“Wait, so none of them tell us how to solve the puzzle?”
“Why would they? That’s ridiculous.”
“…”
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Well, apparently Qin Shi Huang’s tomb was supposed to be guarded by mechanical crossbows. I expect that gut strings would have perished, although maybe they would have used wire.
Of course the mercury is the really dangerous part.
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oh so much… Brrr.
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There are several interesting threads on this subject in the AskHistorians subreddit, and one of them notes a medieval romance (Roman d’Eneas) which has Camilla’s tomb guarded by a Rube Goldberg trap device.
They also note that Roman robot guards were a thing in texts as far flung as Tibet and France. (Presumably because of Talos the robot in Greek myth.)
One guy’s theory is that it’s a metaphor for enlightenment… but that’s a pretty tenuous connection to Plato’s cave. I would go more for the Labyrinth, but the only trap there was the maze itself, and the Minotaur.
Apparently some Egyptian tombs did have drop traps, although they might have just been construction weirdness, and false passages/false walls. The Chinese had false floors, because they were hoping the tomb robbers would hit the false bottom and leave. Costa Rica did have giant stone balls of unknown purpose, but apparently they weren’t traps.
A lot of the trap thing dates back to the Allan Quatermain adventures, and Indiana Jones apparently derives from a couple of epic Donald Duck adventures with Scrooge McDuck doing archaeology.
Unintentional traps include underground cisterns that decide to collapse, sinkholes, spiders, poison centipedes, scorpions and snakes who have found a great home for generations, and collapsing tunnels or buildings that aren’t adequately supported during excavation.
Apparently some abandoned Spanish mines in the New World are “trapped”, but I couldn’t find any documentation of this. Abandoned mines are unsafe by their very nature, so I’m not sure why someone would want to make it even more unsafe.
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On abandoned mines and trapping it might well depend on why the mines were abandoned. In the case of Spanish mines in the New World they might have been driven out of the area and intended to come back and wanted their mines back when they did. And thus trapped them to keep the new owners out.
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There would definitely have to be magic otherwise once a trap was sprung it would be no danger to the second person through.
Lack of magic, therefore, makes tomb robbing more of a numbers game. Will you run out of people before the dungeon runs out of traps?
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Traditionally, it seems that many tomb robbers are relatives of the priests involved in the burial.
Priestly families seem to be less afraid of whatever magics the priests were thought to have laid on the tombs.
In certain cultures, if you had the same family training as a priest, you may be confident in the relative strength of your own magical powers.
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One thesis about D&D dungeons was that they were a kind of underworld, where rules did not apply. For instance, doors were regularly stuck for adventures, but automatically opened for monsters unless you spiked them shut.
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Egyptian funerary priests — that was a job that went down in the family, for generations. There were lands dedicated to feeding the priest family and supporting all the necessary rituals in the funerary chapel near/outside the tomb.
So yeah, if the family was stealing, and then there was some reasonable attempt to cover it up again, nobody else was going to complain, and anybody coming to visit would just go to the funerary chapel, until such time as somebody new was added to the tomb. And they often didn’t add anybody… so you’d be fairly protected.
OTOH, the usual blame is cast on the families of tomb builders, because they were either blue collar or slaves. And they didn’t get free food for generations.
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My headcanon on why traps can be solved: Magic required. One thing that both coding and spellcasting share is that the more competent work put into it the better the system. Magic clearly has lots of loopholes going by myth, and I think the reason why they are so blatant is to keep the magic cost down.
Or a perfect spell is short-lived due to upkeep/maintenance. Like having a sports car versus a working car. Sports cars are hangar queens, and run through tires fast as hell. Working cars, on the other hand can last twenty years minimum doing hard work.
Sports vehicles require a ton of maintenance,from personal experience. Lived next to a drag racer. Guy would spend his entire paycheck and neglect his kid to do maintenance on his truck. Every time it was in good shape, he’d drag race and practically wreck it. Guy would blast the engine at 4Am every day just to check it.
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