The Treasury is a concentration of riches, often those originating from ancient history, considered lost and / or forgotten until rediscovered. Some jurisdictions legally define what constitutes treasure, as in the British Treasure Act of 1996.
The phrase " blood and treasure" or "lives and treasures" has been used to refer to the human and monetary costs associated with massive efforts like war that both spend.
The search for hidden treasures is a common theme in legend; Treasure hunters exist, and they can search for lost wealth to make a living.
Buried treasure is an important part of popular beliefs surrounding pirates. According to popular conception, pirates often buried their stolen fortunes in remote locations, with the intention of returning for them later (often with the use of treasure maps).
There are three well-known stories that helped popularize the pirate buried treasure myth: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug," Washington Irving's "Wolfert Webber," and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. They differ widely in plot and literary treatment, but all stem from the legend of William Kidd. Stevenson's Treasure Island was directly influenced by Irving's "Wolfert Webber", Stevenson saying in his preface "It is my debt to Washington Irving that I exercise my conscience, and just so, because I believe that plagiarism was rarely carried further. A good part of the material detail of my first chapters… was the property of Washington Irving.
A treasure map is a variation of a map to mark the location of buried treasure, a lost mine, a valuable secret, or a hidden location. More common in fiction than in reality, "pirate treasure maps" are often depicted in hand-drawn works of fiction and contain arcane clues for characters to follow. Regardless of the literary use of the term, anything that meets the criteria of a "map" describing the location of a "treasure" could appropriately be called a "treasure map."
