Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb | Hacker News Reader

Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb

theguardian.com

92 pointsbenbreen19 comments

Interesting parallel to the flowing rivers is mercury in the best known Chinese tomb:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/01/flowing-rivers-mer...

Speaking of using robots to investigate mysterious tunnels in tombs, one of the most publicized one must be the discovery of doors in a tunnel within the Great Pyramid: http://www.sciencealert.com/robot-captures-first-images-of-g...

That mercury is designed to kill anyone who enters. It's probably the source of a lot of myths surrounding raiding ancient tombs, and it's found across the globe, most prominently in China. These guys knew someone would come for their treasure someday.

While we think of it as a hazard today, references to quicksilver in history don't connect it with killing people, see https://books.google.com/books?id=nCKxSwUlX-AC&printsec=fron... for example.

Fascinating, I love being wrong here. I looked into it for an hour and you're absolutely right. Sincerely, thank you for educating me about that. I was always told it was a defensive mechanism, even by archaeology professors. I wonder how that myth became so widespread in academia.

May I also say that this is the only place on the Internet, of which I know, where an admission of being incorrect is greeted by a torrent of support rather than mocking or denigration?

Academic discovery includes being wrong, and the fact that this is still understood here makes it an extremely rare place.

Please, please no upvotes to this comment, as I'm simply trying express my gratitude for all of your support for an essential element of academic inquiry.

From the deepest part of my heart, thank you, HN.

Its not mentioned in Wikipedia but people still consume small amounts for cinnabar (ore of mercury) for medicinal purposes.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, this is not advice, just my personal experience...

It works amazingly well to soothe a sore throat (temporarily), far better than the usual lozenges and without the numbing sensation that the stronger sprays and lozenges have. I don't know where to get it. Amazon does not list it. Googling seems to show that it can be purchased from pharmacies in the UK... But I do wonder how safe it is.

When I was a kid any mention of a sore throat brought out the swabs and the merthiolate or mercuro-chrome. I think that's what it was called anyway. Always ended up with red-orange tonsils. Also, any cuts or scrapes were dosed with the same stuff. Band-aids and mercuro-chrome - I'll never forget the smell of a new band-aid.

While there are some extremely toxic mercury compounds, elemental mercury is not among them. See: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200006153422405

Wow! I had no idea you could inject that much mercury and have so few side effects from it. The article states she injected 10 mL of mercury which, due the density of mercury, is 136 g or 0.3 lbs.

Some of these ancient rulers thought that Mercury would prolong life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang

Incorrect. Mercury is considered an elixir of immortality by both European and Eastern alchemists. It would be added to a tomb to promote eternal life.

Pure mercury or it's cinnabar sulfate behaves as preservative on skins or corpse skin paintings. It's not really a big leap then to add it to immortality potions.

Carbon dioxide was a more common hazard - organic material decomposing in a sealed chamber would result in CO2 pooling in the depths, meaning that a visitor many years later could asphyxiate upon entry, which would undoubtedly discourage his friends from following.

At that antient times where on earth they find so much mercury? And how they place it there without killing themselves? And how they learned that it was lethal?

Liquid mercury isn't actually all that toxic. Not what you'd call healthy, maybe, but not anywhere near the level of some of the mercury compounds.

In Cinnabar. They (most likely) didn't know it was unhealthy.

It's worth mentioning that Hg extraction isn't very complicated. Its the kind of thing that we might expect people fooling around with putting stuff in fires would discover by accident. Just roast the ore (Cinnabar, HgS) at the relatively modest temperature of 350˚C or higher and the mercury will evaporate off, likely condensing on a nearby surface. Bam, liquid mercury. Control the condensation and you've got liquid mercury on a large scale.

By comparison, smelting iron is much more complicated (higher temperatures + it's a chemical reaction not just "bake and go" + residual carbon content must be controlled for strength + annealing strategy significantly affects its desirable properties).

I would hope it's liquid mercury. Finding mercury in any other state at ambient conditions would be quite unlikely.

The headline was probably intended to specify that it was elemental mercury, as opposed to mercury-containing compounds or minerals.

Mercury actually concentrates into little beads on cinnabar ore, and is not very reactive. I can imagine drops of it surviving for a few thousands years.

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