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Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo - Season 2 Episode 7 -
Divine Discoveries
Divine Discoveries
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00:00Mysteries can be buried anywhere, under the earth, beneath the sea, or even right under
00:14our own feet. And when we stumble upon them, sometimes what we find can change history.
00:25Tonight, divine discoveries from a sacred fortress in the heart of Rome.
00:33The whole place is buttressed like a defensive stronghold.
00:37They have uncovered one of the most important religious institutions in the entire world.
00:43To a stone tablet with a sacred message.
00:47He does his best to read the writing and what he's got astonishes him.
00:54He's the oldest temple in the world.
00:56It's so ancient that it predates the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids at Giza.
01:02And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years, only to be discovered by chance, makes
01:08that even more extraordinary.
01:10Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.
01:25Sometimes just doing your job results in astonishing finds, especially when that job is construction
01:33in an area rich in biblical history.
01:35It's 1913, and construction of the Palestine-Egypt Railway is moving full steam ahead along the
01:43coast of what is now the modern state of Israel.
01:46But as these railroad workers are clearing out space to lay track, they strike a large stone
01:55stone that seems out of place.
02:00In this sandy earth, they find a flat piece of marble about two feet tall and two feet wide.
02:07As a few workers start to excavate it from the ground, they notice that there's very faint
02:13writing on it.
02:15It's been etched into the marble, and it's in a language that they can't understand.
02:20Intrigued by the find, one worker decides to take the large marble slab home with him.
02:29When he gets it to his house, he puts it in his courtyard and uses it as a stepping stone.
02:34The inscription is placed face up, and it stays that way for 30 years.
02:41Then, in 1943, he puts the stone up for sale, and it attracts the attention of archaeologist
02:49Jacob Kaplan.
02:51Kaplan heads to the house, and when he takes a look at the inscription, he immediately recognizes
02:56the writing.
02:58It's Paleo-Hebrew, which is a style of writing that was used from 1,000 B.C. up until about
03:06135 A.D.
03:08So, right off the bat, Kaplan knows that this thing is really, really old.
03:14And although he can identify the script, he can't actually understand it.
03:19Nevertheless, he goes ahead and he buys the slab, and he takes it home, and enlists some
03:23of his colleagues to help him to decipher it.
03:27As they start to translate, the first line grabs their attention.
03:32It reads, I will call you to remember, for goodness forever, God spoke all these words.
03:39Then, further down the stone, they identify other words.
03:45You shall not murder.
03:46You shall not commit adultery.
03:50You shall not steal.
03:52Kaplan has found a fully intact stone of the Ten Commandments that dates back to the era
04:01of the Old Testament.
04:02In the Bible, the Ten Commandments were famously given to Moses by God at the top of Mount Sinai.
04:11But those tablets are smashed by Moses when he sees the Israelites worshipping the golden
04:16calf.
04:17God later dictated the commandments back to Moses, who inscribed them onto a second set
04:23of tablets in the 13th century BC.
04:26And then according to the Bible, those tablets are stored in the Ark of the Covenant.
04:30But then later on, the Ark and those tablets go missing.
04:34For a moment, it seems the mystery of the missing tablets may finally be solved.
04:40But as researchers study the stone more closely, they realize something doesn't add up.
04:46Only nine of the Ten Commandments from the Bible are present on this stone.
04:52The third commandment is missing.
04:57The replacement commandment is an order to build a temple on Mount Gerizim, which is
05:02a sacred site for Samaritans.
05:05Further research discovers that a Samaritan synagogue was built in the place where this
05:12stone tablet was found.
05:15That temple was constructed between 300 and 800 A.D.
05:20The stone, while old, was likely created hundreds of years after Moses' time.
05:27Dr. Kaplan holds onto the stone for the next 50 years until finally his wife sells it after
05:34his death in 1995.
05:36Over the following decades, it changes hands a few times without much fanfare.
05:41Then in December of 2024, the stone goes up for auction.
05:47The stones age, its distinct third commandment, and the unusual story of its chance discovery
05:54ignite interest in the sale.
05:56Bidding starts out high, and then the price just keeps going up and up and up.
06:01So finally, when the final gavel falls, the selling price is $5 million.
06:06The marble tablet goes to an anonymous buyer who pledges to donate it to an Israeli institution.
06:15In the end, this humble relic will be preserved and admired for generations.
06:21Next, a different kind of sacred discovery, one frozen in time, high up in the Andes.
06:29On September 18, 1995, a mountain climber named Johan Reinhardt and his guide are climbing
06:39Ampato Mountain in southern Peru.
06:42They are hoping to get a photo of an active volcano nearby, but as they get close to the
06:48volcano, the sky fills with smoke and ash begins to rain down on them.
06:56The ashfall is melting the snow under their feet, exposing rock that has been covered by ice caps for centuries.
07:04And as they near the peak, there's something bright and red on the ground catching Johan's attention.
07:10As he gets closer, he sees that the red is in fact red feathers sticking out from some rocks.
07:18And when he looks, he sees that the feathers seem to be part of a hat.
07:23Johan moves away some of the stones, and he is astonished.
07:30Looking up at him from the rocks is the face of a young girl, no more than 12 or 13 years old.
07:37The body looks very well preserved.
07:39She's wrapped in beautiful, colorful textiles, and she's surrounded by gold and silver figurines and pottery vessels.
07:48It's a breathtaking discovery, but one that's also incredibly fragile.
07:54Johan's worried that the heat from the active volcano will soon destroy this naturally preserved mummy.
08:01He carefully picks up the girl's body and begins with his guide the dangerous descent down the mountain.
08:08It is a perilous journey, a treacherous 45-degree descent.
08:14It takes two full days.
08:16And then when he and the guide are down at the bottom, it takes another 13 hours to walk to the nearest village.
08:22Safely recovered, the mummy becomes known as Juanita and is an international sensation, hailed as one of the greatest discoveries of the century.
08:32But when researchers begin to study her more closely, they uncover something surprising.
08:38Juanita is sent to John Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she's scammed,
08:43and researchers determined that she was likely killed between the ages of 11 and 15.
08:49Cause of death, blunt force trauma to the head.
08:53But the evidence suggests that this was no accident, that Juanita was intentionally killed.
09:00Her death may have been brutal, but the treasures buried with her point to something far more sacred than murder.
09:07Several of the items Johan finds with her remains are fashioned of precious metals.
09:13It's not likely these would have been left accidentally behind by a murderer.
09:18It's much more likely that they were intentionally left behind as a sacrificial offering.
09:23The figures and ceramics feature Incan designs, which suggest that Juanita had been sacrificed to the gods.
09:35Child sacrifice is of course abhorrent, but at the time it was a sacred duty.
09:42And this places her death to some time in the Incan Empire between 1400 and 1450.
09:48Juanita's sacrifice wasn't just ceremonial.
09:51It may have been a plea to calm a furious natural force.
09:56Historians believe that the nearby Misti and Sabancayo volcanoes were really at the point of erupting.
10:03And that Juanita may have been sacrificed in order to placate the gods and maybe make that eruption less catastrophic.
10:11There is something almost poetic, if you think about it, that Juanita may have been sacrificed to stop the eruption,
10:18only to be discovered as the ash melted away and revealed her grave.
10:23Let's say you're a regular guy with a passion for scuba diving.
10:33You love looking at coral reefs and tropical fish.
10:37Then one day you accidentally spot something surprising under the waves.
10:42To 1998 in Guatemala, a local businessman named Roberto Samayoa is out enjoying one of his favorite pastimes, scuba diving in Lake Atitlan.
10:56This is a picturesque lake flanked by volcanoes and mountain peaks and charming villages.
11:07Around 50 feet below the surface in very murky waters, Samayoa sees something out of place.
11:14He sees a shape start to emerge.
11:18Getting closer, he discovers it's a large stone structure.
11:23As he continues to explore, he finds a series of staircases, temples, plazas.
11:29This is not just one structure.
11:32In essence, it looks like some kind of underwater city.
11:36Samayoa reports his findings to local archaeologists, but no one believes him.
11:46Frustrated, he leaves the site untouched until 2007.
11:51Samayoa decides to take matters into his own hands.
11:56He dives upon his find once more, but this time he comes equipped with an underwater digital camera.
12:04He snaps a few photos, and now everyone is beginning to believe him.
12:11Researchers spend the next five years using sonar to map out this underwater metropolis.
12:19What they uncover is more than ruins.
12:22It's the remains of a 2,500-year-old Mayan city.
12:27Once thought to be just a legend, they name it Samabaj, a blend of Samayoa's name and the Mayan word for stone.
12:38As researchers explore further, it's the religious elements that unlock the mystery of Samabaj.
12:44Within the ruins, they find 16 different religious structures and two saunas, which the Mayan would use to cleanse themselves before religious ceremonies.
12:54And then there's a large central square with a stone altar and a sacred pillar at one end.
13:01When the Mayan were thriving in this area, around 350 BC to 250 AD, this city sat on an island in the middle of this lake.
13:10For centuries, Samabaj stood as a sacred sanctuary.
13:15So how did this entire ancient city wind up underwater?
13:22One of the volcanoes along the shore of Lake Atitlan erupted.
13:27Lava flowed down toward the lake and plugged up a drainage channel that carried overflow down the mountain.
13:33It's kind of like when you plug up your bathtub while the water's running.
13:36The water just continues to rise and rise and rise.
13:39By the time the water stopped rising, Samabaj was deep under the lake and stayed at a site for 1700 years until Samayoa found it.
13:50Ironically, the same water that drowned Samabaj helped preserve it.
13:56Because of the island's location deep down in murky waters, the site has not fallen victim to things like looting,
14:02which has caused desecration of other historical sites all throughout Central America.
14:08So thanks to that volcanic eruption, combined with Samayoa's discovery, Samabaj is probably the most well-preserved site of Mayan culture to this day.
14:21From an ancient city lost below the waves to an even older site buried under the earth, our next story takes us to a hilltop in Turkey.
14:33Back in 1986, in southeastern Turkey, a farmer is plowing his property along the foothills of the Taurus Mountains.
14:42He reaches this area, which is called Belly Hill, a mound of land that stands about 50 feet higher than the surrounding plateaus.
14:50This area is filled with large stones that all poke up through the earth, threatening to break his equipment.
14:57The farmer has been trying to remove some of these stones. Most of them are too large to get out of the ground.
15:02But on this day in particular, one of these stones catches his attention.
15:07He takes a closer look and he clears away some of the surrounding dirt.
15:12It's a limestone statue of a human figure with finely carved eyes, nose and mouth.
15:18Below that, there's not much of a body except for a large phallus.
15:23The statue looks really old and so the farmer decides to take this to a museum about 12 miles away.
15:32The director of the museum does not seem very interested in this find.
15:35But when the farmer threatens to throw it away, they do reach a compromise and decide to place the statue in the museum garden.
15:41The statue sits there until 1992, when a visiting archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt sees it.
15:50Dr. Schmidt has been doing excavation work nearby and recognizes this as a Neolithic figure, at least several thousand years old.
15:58He wants to know more, so he travels to the farm where it was found.
16:01When he sees the large mound of land that rises up above the plateau, he can tell that it's man-made.
16:07And these large stones that keep getting in the farmer's way are actually the tops of limestone structures.
16:14Schmidt turns his attention to the mound and begins to dig.
16:23Not very long after these excavations began, archaeologists find massive limestone megaliths that are so close to the surface
16:30that some of them have actually been scraped by the farmer's equipment.
16:34Further down, they find 16-foot-tall stone pillars, each weighing between 7 and 10 tons.
16:40Some of them are carved with detailed reliefs of animals, like lions, foxes, snakes, and vultures.
16:48There are also enormous megaliths arranged in a circular pattern over 90 feet in diameter.
16:55All together, the site leads archaeologists to believe that they've uncovered some kind of giant temple.
17:02The site is called Gobekli Tepe, and carbon dating puts its construction between 9500 and 9000 BC,
17:13making it the oldest temple ever discovered in the world.
17:17It's so ancient that it predates writing and the invention of the wheel.
17:23It was constructed 6,000 years before Stonehenge or the pyramids at Giza.
17:29Its age is astonishing, but what's even more surprising is how it was built.
17:35Schmidt estimates it would have taken over 500 people to build Gobekli.
17:42But humans were believed to be hunter-gatherers at this time,
17:46and this site suggests that there was much more intelligence, cooperation, and planning
17:53that went into this than archaeologists could have possibly thought.
17:57Gobekli Tepe was a truly epic feat of design and construction for its time.
18:02And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years,
18:07only to be discovered by chance by a farmer, makes that history even more extraordinary.
18:13When we think of papal palaces, we usually think of the Vatican.
18:23But the popes actually had an earlier home, one lost to time until very recently.
18:33It's the summer of 2024, and the city of Rome in Italy is gearing up for Jubilee 2025.
18:40It's a massive Catholic celebration, and it's expected to draw roughly 30 million pilgrims to the city.
18:49To prepare for the influx of tourists, the city undergoes a lot of upgrades.
18:53One major project is renovating and repaving the public square
18:57in front of Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano,
19:01the oldest public Catholic church in Rome, which was founded in 324.
19:06The plan is to add new landscaping, lighting, even a fountain.
19:12But not long after shovels hit the ground,
19:15workers strike something that appears to be an ancient wall.
19:20Then another.
19:23Then another.
19:26Then another.
19:28It seems they've stumbled on some kind of structure.
19:32They call in a team of archaeologists largely led by Daniella Porro.
19:37She's the special superintendent of archaeology in Rome.
19:41She analyzes these walls and sees that they're made of tuff,
19:45basically an amalgam of stone from volcanic ash buttressed by wood.
19:51She's able to realize through her analysis that these walls date back to the ninth century,
19:58which means they have found something incredibly special.
20:03These are the fortification walls that protected the original palace of the pope.
20:10Before the pope and the Catholic church were based in nearby Vatican City,
20:15the head of the church resided in an elaborate papal palace in the heart of Rome.
20:21It was built around 312 A.D. during the reign of the emperor Constantine the Great.
20:26The palace would undergo several expansions and upgrades over the next 500 years as the church grew in power.
20:33As the church expanded, the papal palace became a target for Arab anti-Catholic invaders
20:42and even Roman aristocratic infighting right at its doorstep.
20:47In fact, the violence and the conflict got so bad that in 1309,
20:52the papacy left the basilica and actually relocated the seat of the pope to Avignon, France.
21:00Abandoned and empty, the palace falls into neglect and ultimately is decimated by fire.
21:09In 1377, the papacy finally made its way back to Italy, this time to Vatican City.
21:15A few hundred years later, Pope Sixtus V decided to tear down most of what remained of the original palace complex.
21:23When construction crews rediscovered the palace ruins 500 years later,
21:29archaeologists turned their attention to preserving the site.
21:33Antiquity experts and archaeologists feel it may take years to fully grasp the enormity of what is in this structure.
21:42What they do know is that they have uncovered an incredibly well-preserved time capsule of one of the most important religious institutions and religious titles in the entire world.
21:57Next, a casual walk in the woods leads to finding another piece of papal history, one that dates back hundreds of years.
22:09It's January 2024.
22:12Jacek Kukowski is walking along railroad tracks in northwest Poland near the German border.
22:18This area was used as a Nazi escape route at the end of World War II.
22:24So people sometimes find remnants of the past here, helmets, firearms or other military artifacts.
22:30As he's walking, his eye catches something half buried under the base of a tree.
22:39He realizes it's a wedge-shaped object. It's made of metal.
22:42But upon closer inspection, he sees this is not a Nazi war relic.
22:47In fact, he doesn't even think it's from the modern era.
22:50It's nothing like he's ever seen before.
22:53Lukowski brings his discovery to a local museum, hoping their experts can shed some light on this find.
23:00There, archaeologist Jagors Kurka identifies that the object is made of lead.
23:06He examines it, and on one side, he sees letters and some Roman numerals, which captures his attention.
23:13Kurka has seen an artifact like this before.
23:16It's a lead papal bull seal, or bulla, used to authenticate papal decrees.
23:23Kurka is now all in, and he wants to find out which pope this actually belonged to.
23:29Every pope's bulla has, on one side, an image of Saints Peter and Paul.
23:35But the other side is always unique. It has the pope's name.
23:39Unfortunately, this seal is cracked.
23:42But he's able to decipher certain things that give him clues as to which pope this might be from.
23:49He's able to see the letters E and U-S.
23:53And based on these clues, he's able to deduce that this was the papal bull seal of one of four possible popes.
24:02Benedict XI, Clement V, Benedict XII, or Clement VI, all of which will date the seal between 1303 and 1352.
24:15Unfortunately, the document the seal was attached to decayed long ago.
24:21So we may never know exactly which pope this bull belonged to.
24:26In any case, the seal survived in that spot for centuries.
24:30But the mystery will likely survive for many, many more.
24:34Imagine finding an unusual stone in a pile of rubble and learning it's covered in writing, dating back thousands of years.
24:46What happens next is an adventure story straight out of the movies.
24:51In 1868, a French missionary is traveling in what is now modern-day Jordan, delivering aid and spreading Christianity in the region.
25:01His work takes him to a small abandoned area near the village of Dubon, where something catches his eye.
25:08In a pile of rubble in ruins, there's one stone that looks out of place.
25:18It's about four feet tall, it's black, and it's covered in strange characters.
25:25He can't read the writing on it, but he does his best to copy out some of the script with a quick sketch.
25:35Later, he returns to Jerusalem and shows it to a friend, who thinks that the writing looks like Phoenician,
25:42an ancient script that was the foundation of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets.
25:47Soon, news of the Phoenician stone catches the ear of Charles Clermont Ganot,
25:53a French translator and amateur archaeologist based in Jerusalem.
25:58Charles is intrigued, and so he dispatches a friend called Yakub Karavaga to go make what's called a squeeze.
26:05A squeeze is a paper impression when the paper is wet, pressed in the inscription, and then pulled away,
26:12sort of like when you rub a tombstone to get the inscription off the front of it.
26:17But before the impression can set, rising tensions between nearby tribes take a dangerous turn.
26:26Yakub and the stone are surrounded by two Bedouin tribes, and it seems that the locals have understood that there's something significant about this monument,
26:35and they're now fighting over it.
26:40In the melee, the paper impression is torn up.
26:43And then suddenly,
26:47Yakub gets stabbed in the leg.
26:50Yakub narrowly escapes on horseback and brings the torn inscription fragments to Charles.
26:57Slowly, one by one, Charles begins to piece these pieces of paper together,
27:03and what he's got in the end is something that astonishes him.
27:08It's 34 lines of texts written in first person by somebody called King Mesha.
27:15According to the Bible, back in the ninth century BC, Mesha rebelled against the kingdom of Israel,
27:23and ruled Moab, an ancient territory located in modern-day Jordan.
27:29The writing is mostly a recounting of Mesha's military victories and other history of the region.
27:37But what really gets Charles excited is that the text contains historical references to Israel,
27:44the House of David, biblical events.
27:46It even gives the Hebrew name for God.
27:49These are some of the earliest references to events in the Bible in the historical record.
27:54Basically, this rock could be evidence that the events of the Bible are based in real history.
28:01They call it the Moabite stone.
28:06But as word spreads, the locals fear the stone will be plundered by Westerners.
28:12So they decide to destroy it.
28:16So they pour water on the stone, and then they light a fire underneath it.
28:22When the water gets hot, it turns to steam, and the steam expands.
28:28And effectively blows the stone to pieces.
28:33The Moabite stone fragments are then hidden among the members of the local tribe.
28:40And Charles spends three years trying to find them.
28:43Initially, he's able to find 38 pieces.
28:48And then eventually, another 19 are either recovered or donated.
28:53And then utilizing the squeeze as reference, he begins to painstakingly reassemble the shattered stone.
29:03In 1873, it makes its debut at the Louvre.
29:08It's an absolute sensation.
29:10People flock to get a personal look at this real-world piece of biblical history.
29:16And the story of how it was discovered, destroyed, and pieced back together again only adds to the mystique of this relic.
29:29Over 2,000 miles away, another hidden box holds proof of a different kind of worshiped figure.
29:37In 1827, an English soldier named James Lewis is posted with the army in Agra, India.
29:47He fakes his own death and deserts the army.
29:51A crime, by the way, which is punishable by death.
29:54He then changes his name to Charles Masson, and for the next few years goes adventuring
29:59and seeks fame and fortune in places like India and the Middle East.
30:04Charles, as he's known, is quite the character.
30:07During his travels, he assumes several identities.
30:11He poses as a monk, as a Frenchman, as a Haji, as a healer,
30:16all the while developing a keen eye for ancient artifacts.
30:20In 1833, the British East India Company hires him to explore and document ancient sites in what's now Afghanistan.
30:32Charles arrives in the Gandhara Valley, and he sees there a series of ruined, domed buildings.
30:40And he goes to explore them.
30:43He is hoping to find some ancient coins that might have some value, but instead he finds a round soapstone box with a lid.
30:55Charles opens the container and discovers pearls and coral and sapphire beads, all burnt.
31:02And at the center of the container, he finds an intricate gold cylinder adorned with carvings and rubies.
31:09The gold cylinder is a reliquary or casket, which would traditionally hold sacred offerings and physical remains of a holy person.
31:20This reliquary doesn't contain any human remains.
31:24Instead, it's carved with a series of eight human figures, and Charles recognizes one of them as the Buddha.
31:32We typically associate Afghanistan with Islam, but early trade routes actually brought Buddhism to the area around the fourth century BC,
31:42about a thousand years before the arrival of Islam.
31:45While Charles thinks he's uncovered a treasure nearly 2,000 years old,
31:50it takes another 50 years before the true significance of his discovery is fully understood.
31:56In the late 19th century, Western scholars start to take more of an interest in Buddhism and its teachings in Gandhara.
32:04They soon realized that the image of Buddha that Charles saw on the casket was the earliest depiction of Buddha ever found.
32:12Today, statues and images of the human figure of the Buddha are common.
32:18But before the first century AD, the Buddha was typically depicted with symbolic images,
32:24like footprints, the lotus flower, or an empty throne.
32:28On this reliquary, the Buddha is clothed in a robe and holds up his hand in a mudra position.
32:37The amazing find becomes known as the Bimmeran casket, and it goes on display at the British Museum in 1900.
32:46Yet the story behind it and the man who brought it to light is almost as extraordinary as the relic itself.
32:53While there's no doubt that Charles was a colorful character and a skillful liar,
32:59it's undeniable that he's also responsible for one of the most important Buddhist discoveries of all time.
33:09The Old City of Jerusalem is known for its rich religious history.
33:14One small stone box found there contains a stunning link to the past, one dating back to the time of Jesus.
33:23It's early 1976 in the Old City of Jerusalem.
33:27A 25-year-old engineer named Oded Gola is looking through items in an antiquities market.
33:35When his eye is drawn to a limestone box.
33:39The dealer tells him that it comes from a nearby neighborhood called Silouat,
33:43but he doesn't know anything else about it other than the fact that it is an ossuary or a bone box.
33:52Ossuaries were very common in the first century A.D.
33:55People would be buried for about a year and then their bodies would be exhumed and their bones would be placed in a limestone box.
34:03It was a way of dealing with space issues if you didn't have enough room for burials.
34:08They were often elaborately decorated.
34:11Sometimes the name of the person or a phrase was inscribed on the side.
34:16The box that Golan discovers is relatively unremarkable,
34:20but on the front of it there is some script in a language that he doesn't recognize.
34:25He likes collecting antiques, the dealer isn't asking very much,
34:28so he buys the box for about $200 and puts it on a shelf in his parents' house.
34:32The box sits untouched for 26 years.
34:37Then, in 2001, Golan meets an ancient language expert named Andre Lemaire at a dinner party
34:45and asks for help deciphering the inscription on the box.
34:51Lemaire is amazed.
34:52It's written in Aramaic, and it says on it,
34:56James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.
35:03Names like Jesus and Joseph were common at the time, as was James.
35:08On the other hand, ossuaries don't normally list the names of siblings of the deceased,
35:13so it may be that this Jesus had to have been pretty important to be name checked on his brother's bone box.
35:21That name drop raises eyebrows, along with questions about Jesus' family ties.
35:26In the Bible, we do know there was a figure named James the Just who was said to be Jesus' brother,
35:33and he was a leader after Jesus' death of the first generation of Jesus' followers.
35:39We also know James the Just was martyred.
35:42He was stoned to death very violently around the year 62 A.D.
35:47If authentic, this would make the James ossuary the earliest written reference
35:52and very first physical piece of evidence connected to Jesus ever found in Jerusalem.
35:59Golan allows Lemaire to borrow the box to check its authenticity.
36:05Lemaire first examines the style of the script, which he dates to around 60 or 70 A.D.
36:13This just happens to correlate historically with when James actually died.
36:19Then he takes bits of limestone flecks from the surface of the box,
36:23and he has them sent away to the Geological Survey of Israel in order to get tested.
36:28They determined that the script could not have been carved with modern tools,
36:35and they also say that the aged patina of the stone could not have been forged.
36:41Lemaire publishes his findings and then begins a press tour to publicize this amazing discovery.
36:47Even with all the evidence, there's no definitive proof of whose remains the box once held,
36:54leading the Israel Antiquities Authority and others to question its authenticity.
37:01Today, Golan loans it to museums around the world,
37:05where visitors can get an up-close look at what might be an artifact of Jesus' life.
37:12They say history can be stranger than fiction,
37:19which is the case with what one young fisherman pulled from the sea in 2013.
37:25August 16, 2013, a young Palestinian fisherman named Judah Gorab
37:31takes his small boat out into the waters off the coast of Gaza.
37:34He's looking in the shallow waters for fish.
37:38As he's looking down from his boat, he sees a dark figure,
37:44maybe 15 feet down.
37:47It looks like a man.
37:50So he's startled at first, but then curiosity gets the better of him.
37:56And he jumps out of his boat and dives down.
37:59And what he finds is there's a large statue down there,
38:06half buried in the sand.
38:09It's dark metal with hints of green and gold,
38:13and Judah wonders if he's found something valuable.
38:17But it's too heavy for him to lift by himself.
38:20Judah heads back to land, gathers up some friends and family,
38:25and they head back out.
38:27And they try to bring the statue to the surface by tying around it a clothesline.
38:32For four arduous hours, they take turns diving down to the bottom,
38:38yanking on the clothesline, dragging the statue across the seafloor
38:44until they finally reach the shore.
38:48They're able to heave the statue onto a donkey cart
38:52and take it to Judah's house for closer inspection.
38:55The statue is a six-foot-tall naked man with dark curly hair.
39:01Judah thinks it's made of gold and that he's hit pay dirt.
39:06And then about a month later, the statue makes a surprise appearance on eBay.
39:13It includes a few blurry photos of the statue laying on a bed in a child's bedroom with Smurf sheets.
39:23Even by eBay standards, this is a strange listing.
39:27Bidding opens at a mere $500,000.
39:30The post and asking price gets the attention of Gaza archaeologist Fadel Alitol,
39:37who identifies the statue as an incredibly well-preserved bronze of the Greco-Roman god Apollo.
39:45One of the twelve Olympians, Apollo is a son of Zeus,
39:49and he's the god of archery, music, truth, and healing.
39:53He's also considered to be one of the most beautiful gods, and this statue does him justice.
40:00Alitol is amazed by how beautifully well-preserved this statue is.
40:06He estimates it weighs more than half a ton.
40:09Given its purported size, condition, and rarity, this Apollo of Gaza could fetch anywhere between $20 and $45 million.
40:20Unfortunately, before Alitol can examine the statue in person, the Gaza authorities swoop in.
40:28Immediately, police arrive to the statue's location and haul it away.
40:35Soon after, in 2023, war breaks out in the region and news about the Apollo statue all but disappears.
40:46Whatever the fate of this particular statue, there is still the hope of other very similar discoveries,
40:52because we know that this statue was actually made from a cast.
40:57And so maybe there were other copies that were made at the same time.
41:01Maybe they're still out there, whether under the water or on land, just waiting to be discovered.
41:10A long-lost papal palace, a statue of a Greek god, fragments of a priceless text.
41:16These are just some of the divine discoveries that give us new insight into the past.
41:22I'm Danny Trejo.
41:24Thanks for watching Mysteries on Earth.
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