Many riddles were embedded in rhymes, playfully disguising answers in metaphors and analogies. Such puzzles did not require any equipment other than wits and ingenuity. The earliest puzzles that were some form of apparatus were probably locking mechanisms, like the complex block systems purported to have been used to seal the pyramids, and the Chinese rings used to lock treasure chests. The latter were so time-consuming to solve that any thief would have been discovered well before he could succeed. Rope tricks, like the legend of the Gordian knot, and embedded objects, like King Arthur's sword in the rock, were mysteries that verge on magic in the minds of the tellers of those tales.
Antiquity abounds with elaborate puzzles, like Stonehenge, labyrinths, the pyramids.
The ancients also knew the lore of numbers and constructed amazing magic squares where the numbers in every row, column and diagonals added up to the same sum. The famous Indian square, a numerical magic square where every row and groups of related four squares add up to the same number. This square is believed to have originated in India. It is the most unusual of the 880 possible solutions to the 4x4 magic square, where not just rows but every symmetrically complementary group of four squares adds to 34. In fact, magic and puzzles are closely related.