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On May 31st, 1873, while digging in the ruins of Troy, Heinrich Schliemann discovered a treasure from the early Bronze Age. It included silver ingots, electrum goblets, and fistfuls of rings, along with bracelets, buttons, earrings, and diadems of glittering gold. Most of Priam's treasure, as it came to be known, was soon acquired by the Royal Museums of Berlin. At the end of the Second World War, it was seized by the victorious Soviets and disappeared.
Only after the collapse of the USSR, was it revealed that Priam's treasure was in the vaults of Moscow's Pushkin Museum. Lost, found, and lost again. Many ancient treasures have come to light, only to vanish a second time, sometimes forever. Until comparatively recently, ancient coins and jewelry were melted down as soon as they came to light. In 1714, a peasant plowing a field near the Italian town of Breccialo, discovered 80,000 gold coins minted in the final days of the Roman Republic.
With the exception of a few coins claimed by a local aristocrats, the entire treasure was thrown into the melting pot and minted into ducats. Well into the 20th century, Turkish peasants who found ancient coins in their fields would often exchange them for gold teeth, sometimes made from the coins metal. From the Renaissance onward, artifacts were usually valuable enough to be saved, though market value sometimes worked against survival. During the clearance of the vast Etruscan necropolis at Vulci, thousands of pots were shattered to keep the price of antiquities high.
The rest of this video will focus on three prominent ancient treasures. One that was almost lost twice, two that have vanished forever. We'll start with the famous Elgin Marbles, the sculptures from the Parthenon and other monuments on the Acropolis that are now displayed in the British Museum. In September 1802, a shipment of the Elgin Marbles, 17 wooden cases including 14 sections of the Parthenon frieze, was loaded onto the Mentor, a small brig. Two days out from Athens, a storm drove the Mentor onto rocks just off the harbor of Kythira. Although the crew managed to escape, the ship sank in 12 fathoms of water.
Elgin's private secretary, who had nearly escaped drowning in the wreck, recruited sponge divers to salvage the Mentor's precious cargo. They were only, however, to recover four of the 17 cases. A ship of the Royal Navy tried to raise the entire vessel, but the cables snapped and the Mentor slipped back to the bottom where it was soon smashed to pieces by winter storms. The following spring, more divers were brought in cutting holes in the battered deck. They gradually recovered another five cases which were buried on a nearby beach and covered with a protective layer of seaweed. But it was not until October 1804, more
than two years after the Mentor had gone down, that the remaining cases were finally cut from the wreckage. The salvage operation cost Elgin 5,000 pounds, the equivalent of about $450,000 today. The Elgin Marbles were nearly lost at sea again in the 20th century. In May 1941, some of the marbles were loaded into the hold of the HMS Rodney, a battleship bound for Boston. A few days after setting out, however, the Rodney was diverted to attack the German battleship Bismarck. Although the Rodney only suffered glancing hits in the ensuing battle, she was badly damaged by the vibration of her own guns and was attacked by the
Luftwaffe as she limped back to Britain. The Elgin Marbles could easily have gone to the bottom of the Atlantic. In 1837, when the Elgin Marbles had been on display in London for two decades, Richard William Howard Vyse, a colonel in the British Army, set out to explore the pyramids of Giza. Although Vyse had no special expertise in Egyptology, he had a great deal of gunpowder and a hearty willingness to use it. Most notoriously, he blasted his way into four of the relieving chambers above the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid. The entrance to the neighboring pyramid of Menkaure had been lost since the Middle Ages.
Vyse initially tried to blast his way in through the gash made in the pyramid side by a medieval sultan. When this proved fruitless, he ordered his workmen to clear sand from the north face of the pyramid until they uncovered the ancient door. Once the descending passage was cleared, Vyse entered the pyramid. Scrambling over rubble, squeezing through passages cut by tomb robbers, smeared with fetid bat guano, he finally reached the burial chamber. All its treasures were long gone. Menkaure's sarcophagus, however, still stood against one wall. The sarcophagus had been fashioned from a single block of basalt.
Its sides were carved to resemble the facade of a palace with a stylized representations of columns and recessed panels. It was, by general consensus, one of the most remarkable artifacts to survive from Old Kingdom Egypt. It was so remarkable, in Vyse's opinion, that it belonged in the British Museum. After being extracted from the pyramid, a process that involved yet more blasting, the sarcophagus was sent to Alexandria, where it was loaded onto the Beatrice, a small merchant vessel. The ship seems to have stopped briefly at Malta. After that, it was never seen again.
Apparently caught by a storm off the coast of Spain, it went down with all hands, taking the sarcophagus of Menkaure to the bottom of the Mediterranean. The wreck has never been located. A few years before the sinking of the Beatrice, another ancient treasure went missing in France. In 1653, a mason repairing a church in Tournai stumbled upon the grave of Childeric I, king of the Franks during the final days of the Western Roman Empire. Beside the bones of the king and his horse were found hundreds of coins, jeweled and gilded weapons, belt and harness fittings fashioned from garnet-studded gold, more than 300 golden bees with glass
wings once attached to the royal cloak, and the massive golden signet ring stamped with Childeric's name and portrait. The contents of Childeric's tomb were claimed by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, who gave his scholarly physician, Jean-Jacques Chifflet, the task of documenting the treasure. Soon after, Chifflet produced a painstaking 367 page description, the treasure was given to Louis the 14th of France. Initially kept in the Louvre, it became part of the royal library's collection of antiquities. On the night of November 5th, 1831, thieves broke into the royal library and stole Childeric's treasure.
It took the police 8 months and the help of pioneering criminalist Eugène François Vidocq to find the culprits. By the time they were apprehended, the thieves had melted down almost the entire treasure. Only two coins, a pair of bees, and the fittings of Childeric's swords survived. There are many other examples of ancient treasures that have vanished in our own time. One thinks of the artifacts looted from the National Museum of Afghanistan and the Iraq Museum. Although researchers now have the benefits of scanning technology and digital databases, lost objects can never really be replaced. In this, as in so many ways, the raw materials of history remain as fragile
as they were during the fall of Rome. Before you go, a quick announcement. My third book, Roman Aqueducts, Battle Pigeons, and Mystery Cults, is now available for pre-order. You'll find a link in the description. Check out my tour page, linked in the description, to learn about my upcoming trips. You'll also find links there to the Told in Stone Patreon and to my other two channels. There are new podcast episodes up on Told in Stone Footnotes and a series of new videos on sites in Spain and Turkey appearing on Synic Roots of the Past. When I was in high school, I read L.
Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, a classic science fiction adventure in which a time traveling historian prevents the Dark Ages. If, like me, you enjoy alternate history, you'll appreciate Min Chon Iang's Son of Julius Caesar, a web novel whose protagonist, a modern man reincarnated as Julius Caesar's son, tries to use his knowledge of the future to save the Roman Republic from destruction. For a limited time, the novel is free to read on Royal Road. You'll find a link in the description. Enjoy, and thanks for watching.
