Make No Bones About It (A Dig Site Mystery Book 2)
A pyramid designed by a little-known Mesoamerican people called the “Derpotecs.”
| Should this cover be in the Lousies? |
Make No Bones About It (A Dig Site Mystery Book 2)
A pyramid designed by a little-known Mesoamerican people called the “Derpotecs.”
| Should this cover be in the Lousies? |
I’m going to guess that this was the Mesoamerican equivalent of one of those boondoggle public works projects that’s supposed to go to the city councilman’s cousin. They made it about halfway through, with the cousin burning through money at about five times the rate he ought, when the council finally got fed up and just canceled it.
There was some of that going on in Egypt too; as well built as those Great Pyramids are, a lot of the ancient Egyptians other pyramids (which they built first) were rather poorly designed and built at irregular angles. Moreover, all those pyramids were boondoggles by definition, being built to store a bunch of treasures the dead Pharaohs and a few other wealthy citizens were trying to take with them into their afterlives when all that wealth would have been far better spent on people still living this life. Not too surprisingly, most of those pyramids’ treasure rooms were looted not too long after they were supposed to have been sealed off to the public.
As the late great comedic political commentator P.J. O’Rourke pointed out, one strongly suspects the looting to have been an inside job. The Pharaohs’ children had the means and motive: they knew where the treasures were buried, had been cheated out of inheriting all that wealth for themselves, and were paying the tomb guards’ salaries. In short, building and staffing those pyramids was inherently a huge waste of everyone’s resources.
Yeah, in retrospect, it turns out that, in a society full of desperately poor people, putting a bunch of gold and jewels in the ground, then building a giant monument over it that might as well have a sign saying, “TREASURE HERE!” wasn’t the best way to keep from getting robbed.
Oh, I’m willing to make bones, alright.