It is important to understand that, generally speaking, Pharaoh's own subjects, in some cases, their direct heirs, are the people who stole their afterlife retirement plans. You see, Pharaoh's power is more or less absolute. They can do whatever they like. Therefore, many pharaohs ransacked the graves of their ancestors, and in some cases even reused these items for their own burial. Some pharaohs even poured their predecessors' mummies out of the sarcophagus, so that even the containers could be reused.
All this in Egypt aristocrats don't want to rob the last resting place of their relatives or ancestors, because, well, technically, in their view, this is their thing sitting there.
It is redundant people who make the rules, and this kind of aristocratic grave robbery is tolerated in the ancient Egyptian world. There are not so many individuals who have no direct blood relationship with the deceased and have been severely punished. The punishment for grave robbers ranges from cruel death penalty to public flogging, depending on the importance of desecrated graves and the value of stolen goods.
As far as the death penalty of grave robbers is concerned, burning alive is a common practice. Why? Well, besides being an unpleasant way to die, it will also make thieves become an eternal nothingness, because in ancient times, people believed that if you died without a body, you could not enter the afterlife.
Other execution methods include beheading, which also means that thieves cannot enter the afterlife and cannot be assassinated. The ancient Egyptians believed that this would lead to the soul of the deceased being bound in that special place forever ... Obviously, this was considered a bad thing, and Pharaoh's hope was that such severe punishment would spare the thief from all these punishments. The problem is that it seems easy to get rid of any trouble. For example, think about a tomb raider in the 1 1 century BC. Amenpanuff described his methods of robbing tombs and how he got out of trouble, even if he was caught:
We went to rob the tomb as usual. We found the pyramid tomb of King Sobekensav, which is different from our pyramids and noble tombs and is usually stolen. We picked up copper tools and forced our way into the King's Pyramid from the deepest place. We found the basement, lighted candles in hand, and went down.
We found God lying behind his grave. Next to him, we found the graveyard of his spouse, Queen Nubas, protected with plaster and covered with rubble.
We opened their sarcophagus and coffins and found the noble king mummy with a sword on it. He hung many amulets and gold jewels around his neck and wore a piece of gold on his head. The king's noble mummy was wrapped in gold, and his coffin was decorated with gold and silver inside and outside, inlaid with P ornamental stones. We collected the gold found on God's mummy, including amulets and jewels around his neck. We set fire to their coffins.
A few days later, local officials in Thebes heard that we were robbing in the west. They arrested me and put me in the office of the mayor of Thebes. I gave my share of twenty German gold coins to Hamopi, who was a local clerk at Thebes Wharf. He let me go, I rejoined my colleagues, and they gave me another compensation. So I got into the habit of robbing tombs.
Grave robbing was very common in ancient times, and almost all social classes participated in it, including funny people, who was responsible for building tombs and burying the dead.
Sadly, although Hollywood will convince you that the tombs of ancient pharaohs are full of deadly traps, the facts are even more prosaic. First of all, the saying that ancient tombs set traps is considered to be just a myth. To quote Emily Tate, an expert on Egyptian and Nubian antiquities who works at the University of Chicago-
I'm really sorry to report that if the curse disappears, there is really no problem. Hollywood has turned standard architectural features, such as sliding portholes, shafts and rooms full of sand, into objects of terror.
This is not to say that you won't find many reports about booby traps from other seemingly prestigious sources. For example, Egypt's tombs are covered with barbed wire and deadly poisonous snakes reaching to the head, all of which are considered unrealistic by practical experts.
On the contrary, the countermeasures used to stop thieves are often just obstacles placed on the road leading to goods, such as large pieces of granite, or clutter blocking the road. They sometimes use empty rooms, but the real rooms are full of all kinds of goods and surrounded by walls, such as
Instead of these rather peculiar security measures, other deterrence tends to be metaphysical in nature-mainly limited to curses, defining the thief's soul as eternal pain and so on.
For example, considering that the following curse was put in his grave by a senior priest of Pharaoh Amenhotep, it threatened that, among other things, any thief would lose their position and honor in the world, be burned to death by the stove, capsized and drowned in the sea, have no heirs, have no graves or funeral offerings of their own, and their bodies would rot because they would starve to death without food, and their bones would rot. ...
Considering that tomb raiding was common at that time, spellcasters sometimes participated in tomb raiding, it is certain that these spells were not taken seriously by many people.
The Pharaoh Amon Hotep was very angry at the frequent raids on the graves of his ancestors, so he ordered the construction of a village called Set-Ma 'at, which literally means "the land of truth", and was responsible for the construction and protection of noble graves. The concept of Set-Ma'at (sometimes called Deir el-Medina) is simple.
The workers in the village will build graves and protect their works, because their wages and housing depend on them.
They will be loyal and cautious about the location of the mausoleum and the number of treasures. However, in
It has been found that the frequent delay in delivering materials (including food and water) to villagers and the basic nature of the above payment did not promote trust and loyalty among villagers. What treasures they hid in ombs and where they hid naturally led to widespread theft.
Although the village is isolated from the world, workers can still isolate stolen goods by walking to nearby cities to trade goods, usually for those who want to melt any gold or similar things and create new objects that cannot be traced back to the grave.
Now that all this has been said, it is speculated that when inhaling enough hematite powder may lead to death, it is used as a booby trap, if not very terrible. For example, in 200 1 year, there was a few inches of this powder on the floor in a grave found in Bahalia Oasis.
It is sometimes said that mercury was used as a deliberate deterrent in many ancient tombs discovered in China, such as the cemetery of the First Qin Emperor. However, experts generally deny this view, although sometimes the amount of mercury is too large, even if it is unlikely to play a very effective role in accidentally preventing grave robbery, it may still cause potential harm to health.
To a great extent, it is the tomb of ancient emperors, and kings and pharaohs are protected, if any, only by simple physical barriers, curses and other abstract threats. If criminals are caught, they may be dismembered and killed horribly at any time, assuming they don't just bribe them out of trouble. Unsurprisingly, grave robbery is very common, which is almost comically simple for some people who have the right to use graves or suitable tools.
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