- 3 hours ago
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00Tonight, the most mysterious of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:07Unlike the other scrolls, this is made of copper,
00:10and it's written as a list of what seem to be buried treasures.
00:13Scholars and treasure hunters alike have to interpret the clues
00:17that are embedded in the Copper Scroll.
00:20If true, the clues listed on the Copper Scroll
00:24could lead to a vast fortune.
00:26More than 160 tons of gold, silver, and bronze
00:31could still be hidden to this day.
00:33We're talking more than a billion dollars in today's money,
00:37if you know where to look.
00:39Now, we'll explore the top theories
00:42surrounding this alleged and mysterious fortune.
00:46The gold and silver was hidden to keep it safe from Roman invaders.
00:50Maybe somebody already looted all of those hiding places,
00:54or maybe tons of treasure are still hiding in Israel today.
00:59Does the Copper Scroll treasure exist?
01:02And if so, where could it be?
01:05Could it be?
01:21In 1947, a 16-year-old Bedouin boy named Mohamed Adib
01:26is tending his goats in the mountains above the Dead Sea.
01:31He's in the Qumran Valley, which is near the Dead Sea in Israel,
01:36and his goats wander into a cave.
01:38Now, of course, he wants to get the goats out of the cave,
01:41and so he just picks up some pebbles,
01:43throws the pebbles into the cave to sort of scare the goats out,
01:46except what he hears is a crash.
01:49Mohamed Adib goes into the cave to investigate,
01:53and he finds out that his rock has shattered an old pottery jar.
01:57And inside that pottery jar is a leather scroll
02:01with some Hebrew writing on it.
02:03He notices that nearby there are many other pottery jars
02:06that are undamaged and haven't ever been opened.
02:09Inside those jars, there are many scrolls in ancient Hebrew writing
02:16that date to about the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE.
02:21Between the late 1940s and the late 1950s,
02:24scholars and inhabitants of the area found various things
02:29in at least 11 caves around or close to the Qumran settlement.
02:34They found jars, they found scrolls,
02:36and out of those scrolls, over 900 scrolls,
02:39over 200 of them were biblical scrolls.
02:46Scholars attribute these works to the Essenes,
02:48who are a very isolated sort of separatist mystical band of Jews
02:54who had left Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE,
02:56and they lived in this area of Qumran.
02:58They really flourished there.
03:00It actually takes a couple of years
03:03before people realize what it is that this Bedouin has discovered.
03:08What he finds becomes one of the most important archaeological discoveries
03:12of the 20th century, the Dead Sea Scrolls.
03:18Within the Dead Sea Scrolls,
03:19one will find the most ancient versions
03:22of almost every single biblical book
03:24in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.
03:27The scrolls are primarily made of animal skin,
03:30parchments, and papyrus.
03:33All of them but one.
03:37In March of 1952,
03:39on a shelf carved into a cave wall,
03:42archaeologists find something different,
03:45a scroll made of copper.
03:48This is a completely unique find.
03:51We have over 900 scrolls,
03:54but only one is made of this precious material.
03:56There's only one copper scroll.
03:59Most experts agree that the copper scroll
04:02is significant by the very material that it's made of.
04:07Copper is durable, and it is expensive,
04:10and therefore what was contained in it was intended to last.
04:14I mean, think about what you have to do.
04:17This is not writing on a piece of paper
04:20or a piece of parchment.
04:21This is literally like stamping something,
04:24incising something into copper.
04:27So you do this for something that is particularly special.
04:31It's also newer than the other scrolls.
04:34This one dates to about 50 to 100 CE.
04:37Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are literary works.
04:40What makes the copper scroll so unique
04:43is that it's really a list of locations
04:47and possible treasures.
04:49If you put together the list of valuables it contains,
04:52it would be somewhere in the range
04:54of potentially 160 tons of gold.
04:58It is not a story.
05:00It is not a once upon a time, here is a treasure.
05:03This is a very dry, in some ways boring,
05:07description of 64 treasure locations.
05:11So some scholars note that the bookkeeping style and tone
05:17actually is very reminiscent of temple inventories
05:21that one would find elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
05:24And so the idea here is that this might be an authentic record
05:28of real treasures that were once possessed by some institution.
05:32We're not talking a couple million dollars.
05:36We're talking about a billion dollars with a B.
05:39We're talking a lot of money in gold, in silver, in jewels.
05:44So this is a lot of treasure.
05:47There's really only one organization or entity in ancient Judea
05:52that would have been able to amass that kind of wealth,
05:55and that would have been the second Jerusalem temple.
05:57There was a first temple in Jerusalem that stood between the 10th and the 6th centuries BCE
06:06that was built by the biblical king Solomon.
06:08Unfortunately, the temple is destroyed,
06:12and all the wealth in it is actually carried off as plunder by the Babylonians.
06:17The second temple of Jerusalem is built in about the year 516 BCE,
06:26and it lasts until the Roman conquest of Judea in 63 BCE by Pompey the Great.
06:35So we know that that second temple would have been standing on the Temple Mount
06:39when the Romans arrived in Judea.
06:42The ancient land of Judea encompassed modern-day Israel, Palestine, and the West Bank.
06:50Roman occupation of Judea was met with resistance among some factions within the Jewish community.
06:57Life under the Romans became unsustainable.
07:00It was impossible to tolerate the amount of taxation,
07:04the amount of overreach on their political governance,
07:08and also their imposition of their own culture and religion.
07:12Jews were not having it.
07:14For about a century, Jews had tried on smaller scales to liberate their land.
07:19What ultimately happens is that there's just such a massive discontent in this period
07:25that in the year 66, it breaks out into open war.
07:29It's the first Jewish-Roman war, as scholars know it.
07:32The rebellion lasted about four years, but it ended when the Romans came in,
07:38squashed the rebellion, and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.
07:42This was 70 CE.
07:44It's during this time, we think, that the Jewish people would start to gather together their valuables.
07:53They would want to have them and protect them, try to make sure that the Romans didn't seize them,
07:59and maybe bury them in different places in order to hide them from Roman eyes.
08:05And it's also probably around this time, maybe 68 or 70, when the Temple is destroyed,
08:12that the Copper Scroll would have been written, everything inventoried, and then buried.
08:18Most scholars today think that the Copper Scroll is describing actual treasures that existed
08:27and were amassed sometime in antiquity.
08:30This would be gold, silver, bronze that apparently was hidden, according to the scroll,
08:35in something like 63 locations.
08:38To find these locations, scholars and treasure hunters alike must first interpret the Copper Scroll's clues.
08:47The English archaeologist John Allegro was actually studying Ancient Hebrew at Oxford University in 1953,
08:55when he was invited to join the team of scholars in Jerusalem who were working on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
09:01The original team couldn't figure out what to do with this scroll,
09:06because unrolling the Copper might mean that it would crumble.
09:11In 1955, they devised this really ingenious method to get the scroll open.
09:18They actually invent this small saw that can cut the scroll into 23 strips,
09:25each of which is curved like a half-cylinder, almost.
09:29Allegro is the first scholar who sees the Copper Scroll opened,
09:33and he begins transcribing and trying to translate it immediately.
09:37What he discovers is that this is a list of valuables, treasures,
09:43and the specific locations where they're buried.
09:46In 1959, John Allegro begins searching for that treasure.
09:52One line of the Copper Scroll that stood out to Allegro, that served as a starting place for him,
09:58was the following line.
10:00Under the monument of Absalon, on the western side, buried at 12 cubits, 80 talents.
10:06A talent is an ancient unit of measurement.
10:10In this context, a Hebrew talent was about 75 pounds.
10:15So we're looking here at about approximately 6,000 pounds of treasure.
10:21Allegro thinks he knows exactly where this place is.
10:25He's looking at a particular site that is northeast of the old city of Jerusalem
10:31in what we know as the Kidron Valley.
10:33There is, in this valley, between the Mount of Olives and the Temple Mount,
10:42a very large tomb, which is known as Absalom's pillar.
10:47And it dates from the first into the second century of the Common Era.
10:52To read the line under the monument of Absalom reminds Allegro of a story
10:59of a young girl who had gone on essentially a field trip with her school to the Kidron Valley in 1900.
11:06She wandered off from her group and she went to Absalom's pillar and wandered around those tombs.
11:13When she returned to her teacher, she had in her pocket some gold coins.
11:18Allegro didn't make very much of the story when he first heard it.
11:21But now he thinks, oh, what if there's some connection between where the little girl finds the gold coins
11:30and the treasure of the Copper Scroll?
11:33So Allegro narrows down his search to the area around the Absalom pillar site
11:39and the tomb of B'nai Hazir.
11:41The time frame is right. Temple priests are buried here.
11:44And, of course, there's that old story about a girl finding gold coins there.
11:50Allegro begins digging in front of Absalom's pillar,
11:54going down to the depth of 12 cubits, which would be about 18 feet down.
11:59He doesn't find anything.
12:01And then he digs in front of the tomb of B'nai Hazir.
12:04And what does he find? Nothing.
12:07And does this stop him? No.
12:14John Allegro, the scholar who first deciphered the Copper Scroll,
12:19fails to find treasure among the ancient tombs in the Kidron Valley outside Jerusalem.
12:25Allegro is not thrown by this.
12:29He hasn't been successful so far.
12:31He's dug and he's dug.
12:33So in the end, rather than giving up, he says,
12:36I'm just going to follow a different clue.
12:39One of the lines that Allegro reads is,
12:42in the fortress in the Valley of Achor.
12:45Okay, fortress, that's a big place.
12:48Problem is, you know, where's the Valley of Achor?
12:53Allegro thinks the Valley of Achor is three miles west of Qumran,
12:58where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
13:00He bases his theory on a line in the scroll.
13:04The Copper Scroll refers to the fortress that is in the Valley of Achor.
13:08And high above the Hyrkania Valley, there is a magnificent fortress.
13:13It's a palace that was used actually by one of the Bible's most infamous kings, Herod.
13:19So that's where John Allegro decides he's going to take his search next.
13:27In 1960, John Allegro organizes an expedition to explore this area of the Hyrkania Valley.
13:33This fortress probably dates to about the 2nd century BCE to about the 1st century CE,
13:39but it had never been professionally archaeologically investigated or excavated.
13:44The Copper Scroll gives Allegro some very specific clues.
13:48Specifically, it says the treasure can be found in the fortress,
13:52which is in the Valley of Achor 40 cubits under the steps entering to the east,
13:59which is about 60 feet.
14:01And what's supposed to be buried there?
14:03The scroll says the treasure is a money chest and its contents of a weight of 17 talents.
14:11That would be more than 1,200 pounds of treasure.
14:15People may ask, you know, why does Allegro keep doing this?
14:17Well, think about what the end is.
14:20This isn't to find a few coins.
14:22This is to find 1,200 pounds of gold and silver.
14:25That's a lot of money.
14:28Following the Copper Scroll clues,
14:30Allegro tries to find the eastern wall of this fortress about 60 feet from its steps.
14:37When he can't pinpoint that exact location,
14:40he begins to explore two tunnels at the northern foot of the cliff below the fortress.
14:46Once again, Allegro digs and digs and digs.
14:50He gets right down there. He gets right in there.
14:52He goes as far as he possibly can and nothing.
14:58Rising political tensions and instability in the Middle East
15:01make further exploration in Qumran and other West Bank sites difficult.
15:06There is no further large-scale archaeological dig near Harrod's fortress for over two decades
15:13when another American joins the hunt.
15:17In 1988, an American airline pilot and avid adventurer, Robert Morgan,
15:23is inspired by the account of how John Allegro had discovered two tunnels
15:29underneath the Hyrcania fortress.
15:31He arranges to have a meeting with Allegro.
15:36Unfortunately, the day of the meeting, February 17, 1988,
15:40is also the day that Allegro suffers a massive heart attack and dies.
15:45And yet, Robert Morgan decides, I want to continue and do this excavation on my own.
15:52The problem is, John Allegro had all the licenses and the permits.
15:56So, Robert Morgan is going to have to try it with no permits,
16:00with no permissions, basically, to excavate.
16:03And so, he decides to do it illicitly.
16:08Morgan is able to enlist a friend and a couple of other Bedouin workers
16:13that they pay to do this, and this is a dangerous thing to do illegally.
16:17So, they're not telling anybody about it.
16:20They park their cars miles away.
16:22And they only dig at night when they're less likely to be discovered or spotted.
16:28And it continues this way for, like, a decade.
16:32The team has made scant progress.
16:35And his friend points out that he will not continue unless the team goes legit.
16:42So, that's when they reach out to Hebrew University graduate student and scholar, Oren Gutfield.
16:48So, Oren Gutfield was able to legitimize these digs.
16:52He was, first of all, able to get the Israeli Antiquities Authority
16:56to provide a permit for Hecania to be excavated.
17:00And so, this is great for Robert Morgan,
17:03because now he's got the connections that he needs
17:06to this great research institution with the resources that it has.
17:11So, it's not just credibility. It's the stuff.
17:14You know, archaeology is not a cheap thing to do.
17:16It requires tools. It requires people.
17:19And he's able to do this with Oren Gutfield.
17:23Oren and Morgan were able to formally and officially excavate Hecania.
17:28They discovered some very interesting tunnels that went underneath the site,
17:33and they were able to completely excavate those tunnels.
17:37The Eastern Tunnel reaches a depth of 262 feet.
17:41The Western Tunnel reaches a depth of 394 feet.
17:45But after they've gone through the entire tunnels,
17:47they haven't found any significant finds, let alone a massive stash of treasure.
17:52Yet another quest for the treasures has come up empty.
17:56But that doesn't stop the quest to decipher the Copper Scroll secrets.
18:00In the late 1980s, more than 30 years since the discovery of the mysterious Copper Scroll,
18:12the search for its hidden treasure is starting to seem fruitless.
18:16Allegro is dead.
18:19Gutfeld and Morgan have come up empty.
18:22But one man doggedly continues his quest.
18:26His name is Vandal Jones.
18:29Jones is a real character.
18:31He's a Baptist minister turned amateur archaeologist.
18:34He's loud, he's opinionated, and he's completely obsessed with the Copper Scroll.
18:41In 1967, Jones moves to Jerusalem and he becomes part of the team that's excavating the site of Qumran.
18:48This is the place where the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the Copper Scroll, were discovered.
18:53If there is a cave in there, we're going to find it.
18:56Yes.
18:57Even though he's out there and he's digging and digging and he's looking, he finds nothing.
19:02His methods and even qualifications are criticized by other scholars.
19:06And when search after search comes up empty, his critics feel very validated.
19:13Jones is undeterred.
19:15He continues digging and in 1988, he discovers a juglet of oil in Qumran, just like the one described in the Copper Scroll.
19:25The oil, supposedly used to anoint kings and priests in ancient Israel, makes international news.
19:32Though some Israeli archaeologists are skeptical, this Texas scholar feels that with the discovery of the juglet, his team is closer than ever to a major archaeological find.
19:45As the world's interest in the Copper Scroll is rekindled, Jones is now bound and determined to find more items from the second temple.
19:54And so, when he finds this little jug, you know, this captivates him because it's like, no, this is real. There's stuff here. So what else is there?
20:06In 1992, he discovers a massive underground stash of temple incense, again, matching something described in the Copper Scroll.
20:15But after that, for Bendel Jones, the trail seems to go cold.
20:19By now, there's a new player on the scene, a professor of Jewish studies from Connecticut who's convinced there's even more Copper Scroll treasure just waiting to be found. His name is Richard Freund.
20:32Richard Freund.
20:34Freund starts looking in a very different location, a more mysterious location. It's actually 25 miles south of Qumran.
20:44Richard Freund sees parallels between this particular Copper Scroll clue and a location known as the Cave of Letters. It's located high up on a cliff side 25 miles south of Qumran on the western bank of the Dead Sea.
21:02This cave is about 50 feet off the ground. You can't just walk into the cave. You've got to climb to get up to the openings of this cave. And I say openings because it's two openings that don't merge into one until about 50 feet into the cave.
21:19The Cave of Letters has already yielded all sorts of ancient relics.
21:25There's a basket of bronze vessels and incense shovels that have pagan images inscribed on them, such as the sea goddess Thetis, who is the mother of Achilles.
21:36These are presumed to be Roman artifacts. But in fact, there are Jewish relics that are also excavated from the Cave of Letters.
21:43There are objects from daily use. There's a kind of a woman's toiletry set that's in there. There are human bones. There's a skull. And the most intriguing for scholars actually is a large cache of letters.
21:59The largest cache of letters and correspondence that we actually have from the period.
22:04The findings also include letters by Shimon Bar Kochba, who is the leader of the Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the year 132.
22:15Freund thinks this site could be really promising.
22:19He's able to lead a group of archaeologists to explore the Cave of Letters in the year 2000.
22:25Some of the technology that he brings is ground penetrating radar. He's able to explore the cave in depth.
22:31He uses another cutting edge technology called electrical resistivity tomography.
22:38This process measures how well the ground conducts electricity with bedrock, clay and rubber all showing up in different colors.
22:47Freund begins overlaying the radar images with the electrical scans and starts to get really excited because he realizes that there's probably a lower layer to the cave that dates back to the temple era.
22:59One of the most intriguing things that they find is this cache of silver and copper coins.
23:08They are coins that were minted by these Jewish rebels.
23:13The problem with the Roman coins at the time is that they bore the image of the emperor on them.
23:18And according to Jewish law, you can't have any images of a living thing on a coin.
23:23So they make their own coins that are aniconic.
23:25And one of these coins actually has an inscription.
23:28And the inscription says, for the freedom of Jerusalem.
23:32Freund looks at this coin as evidence that the Cave of Letters may have well been a Jewish hideout during the time surrounding the destruction of the Second Temple.
23:42He also comes to believe that all of those bronze artifacts that were excavated in 1960 were not really Roman objects at all, but were in fact Jewish ritual objects that were rescued right before the temple was destroyed.
23:57Some scholars argue that the pagan imagery disproves the theory that these items came from the Second Temple.
24:05Freund strongly disagrees with this.
24:10He believes that if the Jewish rebels had the opportunity to have Roman bronze, they would use that material in other ways.
24:18They would have melted it down for another purpose.
24:21He argues that because these objects are deliberately hidden away, that they are in fact the temple treasure that's identified in the Copper Scroll.
24:29Since the Copper Scroll was discovered in 1952, scholars, biblical experts, professional archaeologists and amateur sleuths have all sought the hidden riches listed on the Copper Scroll.
24:47Among those joining the treasure hunt is a retired fire marshal and arson investigator from Oklahoma.
24:53From Oklahoma.
24:56Jim Barfield becomes involved in the Copper Scroll treasure hunt, but in a very roundabout way.
25:05Jim Barfield, as a hobby, has a particular obsession with biblical text.
25:12And he spends all his time during breaks at the fire station just kind of going over these texts again and again, trying to learn them and learn more about them.
25:21His church actually helped him make a trip to the Holy Land to study biblical antiquities and biblical texts.
25:31While the Dead Sea Scrolls represent biblical texts, the Copper Scroll does not.
25:37So at first, Barfield takes very little interest in the Copper Scroll.
25:41Barfield considers the Copper Scroll a treasure map of some sort.
25:44He has no archaeological experience.
25:47So he's not the kind of person who thinks he has the expertise or even will to go out and look for the different treasures.
25:54But this attitude changes when he meets Vandal Jones.
25:58In 2006, mutual friends in Israel arranged for a meeting between Jones and Barfield.
26:05Barfield wants to pick his brain about the Dead Sea sect that wrote the scrolls and also to learn more about the leadership of Qumran.
26:14But all Vandal Jones really wants to talk about is the Copper Scroll treasure.
26:21Between the oil and the incense that he uncovered and also the discovery that was made in the Cave of Letters in 2000,
26:27Jones is convinced that the inventory given in the Copper Scroll is accurate.
26:32And therefore he believes that the temple treasure is still out there waiting to be found.
26:36This is what really peaks Barfield's interest.
26:40Barfield is now very interested in the Copper Scroll.
26:43He finds a brand new respect for what he calls that incredible metal document.
26:49Not long after that meeting, Barfield begins analyzing an English translation of the Copper Scroll.
26:56And he begins embarking on a new quest to unearth all of the gold and silver in this particular document.
27:03What Barfield does as a technique is a little bit different.
27:08He takes geographical maps and he reads that alongside the inventory from the Copper Scroll.
27:16And that allows him to sort of match geographical features.
27:20And he comes across this line at the double entry pool with the entrance at the north edge of the community.
27:28That line draws Barfield back, not to a location, but to an idea.
27:33The idea being where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the first place.
27:41Barfield goes back to the ancient settlement of Qumran because the line in the Copper Scroll mentions something about pools.
27:49And he knows that at the excavations at Qumran, they've discovered large ritual pools.
27:57These pools are known as mikvot.
28:00They are immersion pools that have their dimensions set out in the Hebrew scriptures.
28:06And they're used for purification.
28:07And actually, the Essenes, we know, went down and used these mikvot daily as part of their ritual processes of purification.
28:17The Qumran site is the settlement closest to the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
28:23It's located on a plateau about a mile northwest of the shore of the Dead Sea, off the western shore, about six miles south of the city of Jericho.
28:32Most scholars believe that the residents of Qumran were the Essenes, or some Jewish sectarian group responsible for the collection, if not the creation, of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
28:49Qumran also has links to the priestly Zadok family, and therefore also in some way to the Jerusalem Temple, where some of these treasures might well have originated.
28:59And then you have Qumran's ritual baths, which theoretically might be places mentioned in the Copper Scroll.
29:06It seems like a great place to look.
29:09So beyond the mention of the double entry pool, the Copper Scroll also reads,
29:15Six cubits toward the white immersion of oblation rising from the soil, going down into the left, high above the sea floor.
29:24Barfield believes that this reference to the white immersion actually refers to the layer of white plaster that lines one of these pools.
29:38You can actually still see the traces of that plaster today at that pool, if you look at it.
29:45What else could this be but the place that the Copper Scroll is describing?
29:50The Copper Scroll says, dig three cubits for 40 silver talents.
29:55And so you think, okay, three cubits, four and a half, 40 talents of silver.
30:01It's over a million dollars at today's silver prices.
30:06You know, that's a lot of money.
30:09Barfield eventually secures excavation permits from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
30:15And in 2009, he begins digging.
30:18But there's a problem.
30:19According to Barfield, the Israeli authorities allow him to dig, but not deep enough for what he's trying to find.
30:28Barfield pushes back, saying he has to dig deeper, but he's not allowed to.
30:33Barfield is convinced that over 2,000 years, with the shifting of the soil and the movement of natural material, he's still convinced it's there.
30:43Things take a real turn for the worse after this.
30:48He's running into conflict with his excavators.
30:52Fewer and fewer people show up for the dig, until one day, nobody shows up at all.
30:58He tries and tries to get through to the Israeli Antiquities Authority.
31:01They won't even return his calls.
31:03Without the resources and the workers to staff his excavation, the project simply ceases.
31:09Even though Barfield's critics in the Antiquities Authority believe that he's simply doing sensationalist archeology, he believes that if he had been allowed to dig deeper, he would have found the treasure.
31:26Some experts contend the puzzling clues in the Copper Scroll were only meant to be deciphered by those with insider knowledge.
31:34If you have that much treasure, you probably want to keep it roughly a secret.
31:39And so that could be a reason why modern treasure hunters are having such a difficult time interpreting this document 2,000 years later.
31:47About the time of the Copper Scroll, we know that there was rebellion among the ranks in Judea.
31:52Jews were rising up to revolt against Rome in such a way that it led to violence.
32:02In 66 CE, several Jewish factions managed to temporarily overwhelm the Roman soldiers in the city.
32:10The Romans, unfortunately, came back hard.
32:13They really sweep into the city with an incredible amount of firepower.
32:20A massive Roman army, four legions, perhaps 60,000 soldiers surround the city and begin a brutal months-long siege.
32:31The soldiers finally breach the wall, they overwhelm the rebels inside, and they set fire to the temple.
32:38The resistance is crushed.
32:39Flavius Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, tells us that hundreds of thousands of Jews in the city were killed or enslaved.
32:50If the temple treasure wasn't moved to a secret hiding place outside Jerusalem before this invasion, what else might have happened to it?
32:59After the Romans destroyed the temple, they would have gone to great lengths to find any treasure that they could take with them.
33:08The Roman policy of torturing citizens is well known to extract information about things they want to know, like where is the temple treasure?
33:18As Josephus writes, according to Roman policy, they extracted every last bit of wealth.
33:26That included sometimes punishing or torturing individuals.
33:31Roman society was incredibly brutal, and this is a military occupation that we're talking about.
33:37This is a war.
33:38All they need to do is find the people who know something about where this treasure is hidden, imprison them, interrogate them, torture them, and have them give up all the answers.
33:51Perhaps the Romans found the location of various Copper Scroll treasures through such methods.
33:57Those supporting the idea that the Copper Scroll treasure was looted look at what happened in Rome after the sacking of Jerusalem.
34:10Upon their return to Rome, the Legion commander Titus participated in what's known as a triumph,
34:17where he and his soldiers would have paraded through the streets the spoils of their recent victories.
34:22Part of the procession was a gorgeous golden menorah, right?
34:29This sacred candlestick that came from the temple.
34:32This triumphant parade of everything that was meaningful and secret was not meant to be seen by anybody other than the priests.
34:41They carried out the sacred objects in this whole kind of desecration, really,
34:47and theft of the most sacred objects from the Jerusalem temple.
34:54The Legion commander Titus, who eventually becomes emperor, goes back to Rome and there's a triumphal arch that's erected in memory of his destruction of Jerusalem.
35:05It was such a big event for them.
35:08They depicted on the inner side of this arch the actual parading of the implements from the Jewish temple.
35:14We have images of the menorah, the Temple of Showbread, the silver trumpets.
35:19They're all depicted on this arch that still stands in Rome today.
35:23But the question is, did the Romans get all of it?
35:26Or could it be that some of it is still buried somewhere and the Copper Scroll is the only thing that we have left that would give us clues as to where to find it?
35:35It seems possible, maybe even probable, that the Romans may have looted the temple.
35:41But taking it back and marching in the streets of Rome, that creates a huge issue if we're talking about tons of silver, gold, and other precious metals.
35:50In fact, Josephus writes that many wealthy people in Jerusalem, unable to haul the treasure out of the city, simply bury it beneath their homes.
36:01And when the Roman soldiers do breach the wall, they begin forcing people to dig up any gold, silver, expensive furniture they have buried.
36:10Some believe that centuries later, hidden temple treasure eventually ended up stashed under one of Rome's most iconic holy sites.
36:21We know that the wealth of the Vatican has been called incalculable.
36:25There are vast networks of tunnels underneath that hold artifacts that are not even on display.
36:32The Israel Antiquities Authority in 2004 were able to get permission from the Vatican to explore underneath, and they found nothing.
36:41So, despite finding nothing, there are some who still believe there may be treasures hidden, locked away in a room in the Vatican.
36:51Ever since the Copper Scroll was discovered in 1952, scholars have argued about the alleged hidden fortune, questioning whether it was fact or fiction.
37:04Though many experts now agree that the Copper Scroll is a real historical record of a real historical set of artifacts, there are many people who think it might simply be folklore.
37:16A former director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities says what we have with the Copper Scrolls is a collection of traditions about ancient treasure.
37:33Note the word traditions here.
37:35The article also takes issue with the sheer size of the Copper Scroll treasure.
37:41It notes that if you look at all the gold, silver, and bronze there, you would have 200 tons of metal.
37:47That's an extraordinary amount of treasure to disappear without a trace, unless the treasure is more myth than reality.
37:56Many prominent scholars have concluded that the Copper Scrolls treasures don't exist.
38:04They insist instead that this is drawn from a rich treasury of folklore, going back to the earliest treasure associated with the first temple of Jerusalem.
38:15With the fall of that first temple of Jerusalem, naturally there is a memory, a memory of what has been lost.
38:24And this sometimes translates into legend and folklore.
38:28One such legendary account was recorded by the historian Flavius Josephus.
38:37He tells a story from the time of Pontius Pilate, the man who executed Jesus, who was governor of Judea between 26 and 37 CE.
38:46In one of the revolts, here's a man that comes on the scene and says,
38:51hey, I know where there's treasure hidden.
38:54Everyone come with me.
38:55Let's go look for this treasure.
38:58People, of course, like, treasure?
38:59Sure.
39:00I'll go follow you.
39:01I'll look for this treasure.
39:03They don't find this treasure.
39:04All of a sudden they realize, oh, this man has just fooled them.
39:06This is a hoax.
39:08For those people who say this is all some kind of mythology, right?
39:14Like a fake treasure map.
39:16There is a really good answer.
39:17That is, why would anybody write down a simple story, a fiction, on a piece of precious metal?
39:27Copper is expensive.
39:28It's hard to come by.
39:30And the amount of manpower, right?
39:34And the amount of money that it would have taken to put together the Copper Scroll seems to suggest that what they are writing about is real.
39:43It's not just in someone's imagination.
39:46What we do know is that it survived the elements and the ravages of time to set in motion a new spirit of discovery and any number of peoples who still want to go find the treasures of the Copper Scroll.
40:00While scholars seek to understand more about the Copper Scroll and its list of secrets, archaeologists continue to search for more historical treasures.
40:13In 2017, the Israeli Antiquities Authority launched Operation Scroll, an effort to explore every cave in the Dead Sea region.
40:25Perhaps inside one of these caves, they'll discover the key to understanding the clues in the Copper Scroll and we'll finally find where its vast treasures may be buried.
40:36I'm Lawrence Fishburne.
40:37Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
40:41I'm Lawrence Fishburne.
Recommended
28:49
|
Up next
23:30
21:12
21:12
41:06
21:26
41:32
43:11
50:49
42:21
42:40
24:00
41:30
24:33
1:05:55
29:33
40:29
1:11:41
26:27
41:30
Be the first to comment