I just saw the film *Dora and the Lost City of Gold*, in which there is a somewhat meta running commentary over whether so-called "jungle puzzles", intellectual challenges typically requiring explorers to push the right buttons, pull the right levers, step on the right tiles, make the correct offering to an idol, etc., and that stereotypically guard large caches of treasure in treasure hunting films, actually exist.

Did ancient peoples ever actually guard their treasure behind intellectual puzzles? To be clear, it seems to have been *extremely* common for treasure to be guarded by *security through obscurity* solutions, with [passages hidden behind fake walls](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/king-tut-tomb-hidden-chamber-scan-egypt/), stuff buried in the middle of nowhere, and [decoy artifacts and rooms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_South_Saqqara_pyramid), but I'm having trouble finding any instances of actual *puzzles* of the kind that appear in *Indiana Jones* films and *Dungeons & Dragons* adventures, where the original designers seem to have *intended* that the puzzle be *solved* at some future time by persons deemed worthy enough *by possession of the correct skills or knowledge*.

The critical difference between a "puzzle" and ordinary hidden or buried treasure is the apparent *intent* that a future quest for the items would involve significant *intellectual* efforts, such as applying knowledge of traditional lore, recognizing obscure grammatical quirks, solving math problems, using lateral thinking skills, applying steganographic analysis, recognizing out-of-place elements (e.g. all these symbols are of animals that lay eggs except this one, so this is the correct lever to pull and none other), and otherwise performing cognitively significant tasks beyond bare memorization. "Everyone remember where we buried the rubies" (ordinary buried treasure) and "Ok, we'll dig up every basement in town until we find the tunnel" (brute force solutions) don't count.