- 13 hours ago
Category
📺
TVTranscript
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.
00:24Tonight, divine discoveries from a sacred fortress in the heart of Rome.
00:33The whole place is buttressed like a defensive stronghold.
00:36They 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.
00:54To 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.
01:11Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.
01:14Sometimes, just doing your job results in astonishing fines.
01:29Especially, when that job is construction in an area rich in biblical history.
01:35It's 1913.
01:37And construction of the Palestine-Egypt Railway is moving full steam ahead along the coast
01:44of what is now the modern state of Israel.
01:48But as these railroad workers are clearing out space to lay track, they strike a large stone
01:55that seems out of place.
01:58In 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.
02:50Jacob Kaplan heads to the house and when he takes a look at the inscription, he immediately
02:56recognizes the writing.
02:58It's Paleo-Hebrew, which is a style of writing that was used from 1000 BC up until about 135
03:07AD.
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.
03:38Then, further down the stone, they identify other words.
03:44You shall not murder.
03:46You shall not commit adultery.
03:49You shall not steal.
03:50In the Bible, Kaplan has found a fully intact stone of the Ten Commandments that dates back
04:00to the era of the Old Testament.
04:02In the Bible, the Ten Commandments were famously given to Moses by God at the top of Mount Sinai.
04:10But those tablets are smashed by Moses when he sees the Israelites worshipping the golden calf.
04:15God later dictated the commandments back to Moses who inscribed them onto a second set of tablets
04:22in the 13th century BC.
04:24And then according to the Bible, those tablets are stored in the Ark of the Covenant.
04:28But then later on, the Ark and those tablets go missing.
04:32For a moment, it seems the mystery of the missing tablets may finally be solved.
04:39But as researchers study the stone more closely, they realize something doesn't add up.
04:45Only nine of the Ten Commandments from the Bible are present on this stone.
04:51The third commandment is missing.
04:53The replacement commandment is an order to build a temple on Mount Gerizim, which is a sacred site for Samaritans.
05:04Further research discovers that a Samaritan synagogue was built in the place where this stone tablet was found.
05:13That temple was constructed between 300 and 800 A.D.
05:19So the stone, while old, was likely created hundreds of years after Moses' time.
05:26Dr. Kaplan holds onto the stone for the next 50 years until finally his wife sells it after his 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.
05:46The stone's age, its distinct third commandment, and the unusual story of its chance discovery ignite interest in the sale.
05:55Bidding starts out high, and then the price just keeps going up and up and up until 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.
06:13In the end, this humble relic will be preserved and admired for generations.
06:20Next, a different kind of sacred discovery, one frozen in time, high up in the Andes.
06:28On September 18, 1995, a mountain climber named Johan Reinhardt and his guide are climbing Ampato Mountain in southern Peru.
06:40They are hoping to get a photo of an active volcano nearby, but as they get close to the volcano...
06:47The sky fills with smoke and ash begins to rain down on them.
06:54The ashfall is melting the snow under their feet, exposing rock that has been covered by ice caps for centuries.
07:02And as they near the peak, there's something bright and red on the ground catching Johan's attention.
07:09As he gets closer, he sees that the red is in fact red feathers sticking out from some rocks.
07:17And when he looks, he sees that the feathers seem to be part of a hat.
07:21Johan moves away some of the stones, and he is astonished.
07:27Looking up at him from the rocks is the face of a young girl, no more than 12 or 13 years old.
07:36The body looks very well preserved.
07:38She's wrapped in beautiful, colorful textiles, and she's surrounded by gold and silver figurines and pottery vessels.
07:47It's a breathtaking discovery, but one that's also incredibly fragile.
07:53Johan's worried that the heat from the active volcano will soon destroy this naturally preserved mummy.
08:00He carefully picks up the girl's body and begins with his guide the dangerous descent down the mountain.
08:07It is a perilous journey, a treacherous 45-degree descent.
08:13It takes two full days.
08:15And then when he and the guide are down at the bottom, it takes another 13 hours to walk to the nearest village.
08:21Safely recovered, the mummy becomes known as Juanita, and is an international sensation hailed as one of the greatest discoveries of the century.
08:31But when researchers begin to study her more closely, they uncover something surprising.
08:37Juanita is sent to John Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she's scanned, and researchers determined that she was likely killed between the ages of 11 and 15.
08:48The cause of death, blunt force trauma to the head.
08:52But the evidence suggests that this was no accident, that Juanita was intentionally killed.
08:59Her death may have been brutal, but the treasures buried with her point to something far more sacred than murder.
09:06Several of the items Johan finds with her remains are fashioned of precious metals.
09:12It's not likely these would have been left accidentally behind by a murderer.
09:17It's much more likely that they were intentionally left behind as a sacrificial offering.
09:22The figures and ceramics feature Incan designs, which suggest that Juanita had been sacrificed to the gods.
09:34Child sacrifice is of course abhorrent, but at the time it was a sacred duty.
09:40And this places her death to sometime in the Incan Empire, between 1400 and 1450.
09:47Juanita's sacrifice wasn't just ceremonial.
09:50It may have been a plea to calm a furious natural force.
09:55Historians believe that the nearby Misti and Sabancayo volcanoes were really at the point of erupting,
10:02and that Juanita may have been sacrificed in order to placate the gods and maybe make that eruption less catastrophic.
10:10There is something almost poetic, if you think about it, that Juanita may have been sacrificed to stop the eruption,
10:17only to be discovered as the ash melted away and revealed her grave.
10:28Let's say you're a regular guy with a passion for scuba diving.
10:32You love looking at coral reefs and tropical fish.
10:36Then 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.
10:57This is a picturesque lake flanked by volcanoes and mountain peaks and charming villages.
11:04Around 50 feet below the surface, in very murky waters, Samayoa sees something out of place.
11:14He sees a shape start to emerge.
11:17Getting 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.
11:31In essence, it looks like some kind of underwater city.
11:40Samayoa reports his findings to local archaeologists, but no one believes him.
11:46Frustrated, he leaves the site untouched until 2007.
11:52Samayoa 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.
12:10Researchers spend the next five years using sonar to map out this underwater metropolis.
12:18What they uncover is more than ruins.
12:21It's the remains of a 2,500-year-old Mayan city.
12:27Once thought to be just a legend, they name it Samabaj.
12:31A blend of Samayoa's name and the Mayan word for stone.
12:37As researchers explore further, it's the religious elements that unlock the mystery of Samabaj.
12:43Within the ruins, they find 16 different religious structures and two saunas, which the Maya would use to cleanse themselves before religious ceremonies.
12:53And then there's a large central square with a stone altar and a sacred pillar at one end.
12:59When the Maya were thriving in this area, around 350 BC to 250 AD, this city sat on an island in the middle of this lake.
13:09For centuries, Samabaj stood as a sacred sanctuary.
13:14So how did this entire ancient city wind up underwater?
13:21One of the volcanoes along the shore of Lake Atitlan erupted.
13:26Lava flowed down toward the lake and plugged up a drainage channel that carried overflow down the mountain.
13:32It's kind of like when you plug up your bathtub while the water's running.
13:35The water just continues to rise and rise and rise.
13:38By the time the water stopped rising, Samabaj was deep under the lake and stayed at a site for 1700 years until Samayoa found it.
13:49Ironically, the same water that drowned Samabaj helped preserve it.
13:55Because of the island's location deep down in murky waters, the site has not fallen victim to things like looting,
14:01which has caused desecration of other historical sites all throughout Central America.
14:07So thanks to that volcanic eruption, combined with Samayoa's discovery,
14:12Samabaj is probably the most well-preserved site of Mayan culture to this day.
14:20From an ancient city lost below the waves to an even older site buried under the earth,
14:26our next story takes us to a hilltop in Turkey.
14:32Back in 1986, in southeastern Turkey, a farmer is plowing his property along the foothills of the Taurus Mountains.
14:41He reaches this area, which is called Belly Hill, a mound of land that stands about 50 feet higher than the surrounding plateaus.
14:48This area is filled with large stones that all poke up through the earth, threatening to break his equipment.
14:56The farmer's 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.
15:06He takes a closer look and he clears away some of the surrounding dirt.
15:10It'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.
15:25The statue looks really old and so the farmer decides to take this to a museum about 12 miles away.
15:31The director of the museum does not seem very interested in this find, but when the farmer threatens to throw it away,
15:37they 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,
15:56at least several thousand years old.
15:57He 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.
16:18Not very long after these excavations began, archaeologists find massive limestone megaliths that are so close to the surface that some of them have actually been scraped by the farmer's equipment.
16:33Further 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.
16:54All together, the site leads archaeologists to believe that they've uncovered some kind of giant temple.
17:01The site is called Gobekli Tepe, and carbon dating puts its construction between 9500 and 9000 BC, making it the oldest temple ever discovered in the world.
17:15It's so ancient that it predates writing and the invention of the wheel.
17:22It was constructed 6,000 years before Stonehenge or the pyramids at Giza.
17:28Its age is astonishing, but what's even more surprising is how it was built.
17:34Schmidt estimates it would have taken over 500 people to build Gobekli.
17:41But humans were believed to be hunter-gatherers at this time, and this site suggests that there was much more intelligence, cooperation, and planning that went into this than archaeologists could have possibly thought.
17:57Gobekli Tepe was a truly epic feat of design and construction for its time.
18:01And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years, only to be discovered by chance, by a farmer, makes that history even more extraordinary.
18:18When we think of papal palaces, we usually think of the Vatican.
18:22But the popes actually had an earlier home, one lost to time, until very recently.
18:31It's the summer of 2024, and the city of Rome in Italy is gearing up for Jubilee 2025.
18:38It's a massive Catholic celebration, and it's expected to draw roughly 30 million pilgrims to the city.
18:47To prepare for the influx of tourists, the city undergoes a lot of upgrades.
18:53One major project is renovating and repaving the public square in front of Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, the 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, workers strike something that appears to be an ancient wall.
19:22Then another.
19:24Then another.
19:26It seems they've stumbled on some kind of structure.
19:30They call in a team of archaeologists largely led by Daniella Porro.
19:36She's the special superintendent of archaeology in Rome.
19:41She analyzes these walls and sees that they're made of tuff, basically an amalgam of stone from volcanic ash buttressed by wood.
19:50She's able to realize through her analysis that these walls date back to the ninth century, which means they have found something incredibly special.
20:02These are the fortification walls that protected the original palace of the Pope.
20:11Before the Pope and the Catholic Church were based in nearby Vatican City, the head of the church resided in an elaborate papal palace in the heart of Rome.
20:19It 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 and even Roman aristocratic infighting right at its doorstep.
20:45In fact, the violence and the conflict got so bad that in 1309, the papacy left the basilica and actually relocated the seat of the Pope to Avignon, France.
20:59Abandoned and empty, the palace falls into neglect and ultimately is decimated by fire.
21:05In 1377, the papacy finally made its way back to Italy, this time to Vatican City.
21:14A few hundred years later, Pope Sixtus V decided to tear down most of what remained of the original palace complex.
21:22When construction crews rediscovered the palace ruins 500 years later, archaeologists turned their attention to preserving the site.
21:31Antiquity experts and archaeologists feel it may take years to fully grasp the enormity of what is in this structure.
21:41What 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.
21:52Next, a casual walk in the woods leads to finding another piece of papal history, one that dates back hundreds of years.
22:05It's January 2024.
22:06It's January 2024.
22:10Jacek 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.
22:23So people sometimes find remnants of the past here.
22:26Helmets, firearms or other military artifacts.
22:29As he's walking, his eye catches something half buried under the base of a tree.
22:38He 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.
22:46In fact, he doesn't even think it's from the modern era.
22:49It's nothing like he's ever seen before.
22:52Jacek Kukowski 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.
23:15It'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.
23:38Unfortunately, this seal is cracked, but 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.
24:14Unfortunately, the document the seal was attached to decayed long ago.
24:20So we may never know exactly which pope this bull belonged to.
24:25In any case, the seal survived in that spot for centuries, but the mystriate will likely survive for many, many more.
24:37Imagine 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.
24:50In 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.
25:06In a pile of rubble in ruins, there's one stone that looks out of place.
25:16It's about four feet tall, it's black, and it's covered in strange characters.
25:22He can't read the writing on it, but he does his best to copy out some of the script with a quick sketch.
25:33Later, he returns to Jerusalem and shows it to a friend, who thinks that the writing looks like Phoenician, an ancient script that was the foundation of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets.
25:45Soon, news of the Phoenician stone catches the ear of Charles Clermont Ghanot, a French translator and amateur archaeologist based in Jerusalem.
25:58Charles is intrigued, and so he dispatches a friend called Yacoub Karavaga to go make what's called a squeeze.
26:04A squeeze is a paper impression when the paper is wet, pressed in the inscription, and then pulled away, sort 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.
26:24Yacoub 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, and they're now fighting over it.
26:37In the melee, the paper impression is torn up, and then suddenly, Yacoub gets stabbed in the leg.
26:48Yacoub narrowly escapes on horseback and brings the torn inscription fragments to Charles.
26:56Slowly, one by one, Charles begins to piece these pieces of paper together, and what he's got in the end is something that astonishes him.
27:07It's 34 lines of texts written in first person by somebody called King Mesha.
27:14According to the Bible, back in the 9th century BC, Mesha rebelled against the Kingdom of Israel and 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.
27:36But what really gets Charles excited is that the text contains historical references to Israel, the House of David, biblical events.
27:45It even gives the Hebrew name for God.
27:48These are some of the earliest references to events in the Bible in the historical record.
27:53Basically, this rock could be evidence that the events of the Bible are based in real history.
28:00They call it the Moabite stone.
28:05But as word spreads, the locals fear the stone will be plundered by Westerners.
28:12So they decide to destroy it.
28:14So 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 and effectively blows the stone to pieces.
28:32The Moabite stone fragments are then hidden among the members of the local tribe.
28:39And Charles spends three years trying to find them.
28:43Initially, he's able to find 38 pieces.
28:47And then eventually, another 19 are either recovered or donated.
28:52And then, utilizing the squeeze as reference, he begins to painstakingly reassemble the shattered stone.
28:59In 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.
29:26Over 2,000 miles away, another hidden box holds proof of a different kind of worshiped figure.
29:39In 1827, an English soldier named James Lewis is posted with the army in Agra, India.
29:46He 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.
29:56And for the next few years, goes adventuring and seeks fame and fortune in places like India and the Middle East.
30:03Charles, as he's known, is quite the character.
30:06During his travels, he assumes several identities.
30:10He poses as a monk, as a Frenchman, as a Haji, as a healer, all 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.
30:31Charles arrives in the Gandara 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.
30:48But instead, he finds a round soapstone box with a lid.
30:53Charles opens the container and discovers pearls and coral and sapphire beads, all burnt.
31:01And at the center of the container, he finds an intricate gold cylinder adorned with carvings and rubies.
31:08The gold cylinder is a reliquary or casket, which would traditionally hold sacred offerings and physical remains of a holy person.
31:19This reliquary doesn't contain any human remains.
31:23Instead, it's carved with a series of eight human figures.
31:27And Charles recognizes one of them as the Buddha.
31:32We typically associate Afghanistan with Islam.
31:36But early trade routes actually brought Buddhism to the area around the fourth century B.C.,
31:41about a thousand years before the arrival of Islam.
31:44While Charles thinks he's uncovered a treasure nearly 2,000 years old,
31:49it 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 Gandara.
32:03They soon realized that the image of Buddha that Charles saw on the casket was the earliest depiction of Buddha ever found.
32:11Today, statues and images of the human figure of the Buddha are common.
32:17But before the first century A.D., the Buddha was typically depicted with symbolic images like footprints, the lotus flower, or an empty throne.
32:27On this reliquary, the Buddha is clothed in a robe and holds up his hand in a mudra position.
32:34The 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.
32:52While there's no doubt that Charles was a colorful character and a skillful liar, it's undeniable that he's also responsible for one of the most important Buddhist discoveries of all time.
33:04The Old City of Jerusalem is known for its rich religious history.
33:13One small stone box found there contains a stunning link to the past, one dating back to the time of Jesus.
33:21It's early 1976 in the Old City of Jerusalem.
33:26A 25-year-old engineer named Oded Golan is looking through items in an antiquities market when his eye is drawn to a limestone box.
33:37The dealer tells him that it comes from a nearby neighborhood called Silouat, but he doesn't know anything else about it other than the fact that it is an ossuary or a bone box.
33:48Ossuaries were very common in the first century AD.
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.
34:07They were often elaborately decorated.
34:10Sometimes the name of the person or a phrase was inscribed on the side.
34:15The box that Golan discovers is relatively unremarkable, but on the front of it there is some script in a language that he doesn't recognize.
34:24He likes collecting antiques. The dealer isn't asking very much, so 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. Then, in 2001, Golan meets an ancient language expert named Andre Lemaire at a dinner party and asks for help deciphering the inscription on the box.
34:49Lemaire is amazed. It's written in Aramaic, and it says on it, James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.
35:02Names like Jesus and Joseph were common at the time, as was James.
35:07On the other hand, ossuaries don't normally list the names of siblings of the deceased, so it may be that this Jesus had to have been pretty important to be name checked on his brother's bone box.
35:19That 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, and he was a leader after Jesus' death of the first generation of Jesus' followers.
35:38We also know James the Just was martyred. He was stoned to death very violently around the year 62 A.D.
35:46If authentic, this would make the James ossuary the earliest written reference and 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.
36:04Lemaire first examines the style of the script, which he dates to around 60 or 70 A.D.
36:12This just happens to correlate historically with when James actually died.
36:17Then he takes bits of limestone flecks from the surface of the box, and he has them sent away to the Geological Survey of Israel in order to get tested.
36:27They determine that the script could not have been carved with modern tools, and they also say that the aged patina of the stone could not have been forged.
36:40Lemaire publishes his findings and then begins a press tour to publicize this amazing discovery.
36:46Even with all the evidence, there's no definitive proof of whose remains the box once held, leading the Israel Antiquities Authority and others to question its authenticity.
36:59Today, Golan loans it to museums around the world where visitors can get an up-close look at what might be an artifact of Jesus' life.
37:11They say history can be stranger than fiction, which is the case with what one young fisherman pulled from the sea in 2013.
37:24August 16th, 2013.
37:27A young Palestinian fisherman named Judah Gorab takes his small boat out into the waters off the coast of Gaza.
37:33He's looking in the shallow waters for fish.
37:36As he's looking down from his boat, he sees a dark figure, maybe 15 feet down.
37:45It looks like a man.
37:49So he's startled at first, but then curiosity gets the better of him.
37:54And he jumps out of his boat and dives down.
37:58And what he finds is there's a large statue down there, half buried in the sand.
38:07It's dark metal with hints of green and gold.
38:12And Judah wonders if he's found something valuable.
38:15But it's too heavy for him to lift by himself.
38:18Judah heads back to land, gathers up some friends and family and they head back out.
38:25And 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, yanking on the clothesline,
38:40dragging the statue across the sea floor until they finally reach the shore.
38:47They're able to heave the statue onto a donkey cart and 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.
39:22Even by eBay standards, this is a strange listing.
39:26Bidding opens at a mere $500,000.
39:29The 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.
39:44One of the 12 Olympians, Apollo is a son of Zeus and 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.
39:59Alitol is amazed by how beautifully well-preserved this statue is.
40:05He estimates it weighs more than half a ton.
40:08Given its purported size, condition and rarity, this Apollo of Gaza could fetch anywhere between $20 and $45 million.
40:18Unfortunately, before Alitol can examine the statue in person, the Gaza authorities swoop in.
40:27Immediately, police arrive to the statue's location and haul it away.
40:33Soon after, in 2023, war breaks out in the region and news about the Apollo statue all but disappears.
40:44Whatever the fate of this particular statue, there is still the hope of other very similar discoveries.
40:51Because we know that this statue was actually made from a cast.
40:56And so maybe there were other copies that were made at the same time.
40:59Maybe they're still out there, whether under the water or on land, just waiting to be discovered.
41:06A long-lost papal palace, a statue of a Greek god, fragments of a priceless text.
41:15These are just some of the divine discoveries that give us new insight into the past.
41:21I'm Danny Trejo, thanks for watching Mysteries on Earth.
Be the first to comment