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Mysteries Unearthed with Danny Trejo Season 2 Episode 07 Divine Discoveries EnglishMovie cdrama drama engsub chinesedramaengsub movieshortfull
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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. The whole place
00:34is buttressed like a defensive stronghold. They have uncovered one of the most important
00:39religious institutions in the entire world. To a stone tablet with a sacred message. He
00:47does his best to read the writing and what he's got astonishes him. To the oldest temple
00:55in the world. It's so ancient that it predates the construction of Stonehenge and the pyramids
01:00at Giza. And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years, only to be discovered by chance,
01:08makes that even more extraordinary. Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.
01:23Sometimes just doing your job results in astonishing finds, especially when that job is construction
01:32in an area rich in biblical history. It's 1913. And construction of the Palestine-Egypt railway
01:41is moving full steam ahead along the coast of what is now the modern state of Israel.
01:47But as these railroad workers are clearing out space to lay track,
01:51they strike a large stone that seems out of place.
01:57In this sandy earth, they find a flat piece of marble about two feet tall and two feet wide.
02:05As a few workers start to excavate it from the ground, they notice that there's very faint writing on it.
02:14It'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.
02:33The 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 Jacob Kaplan.
02:51Kaplan heads to the house and when he takes a look at the inscription, he immediately recognizes the writing.
03:00It's Paleo-Hebrew, which is a style of writing that was used from 1000 BC up until about 135 AD.
03:07So, 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 of his colleagues to help him to decipher it.
03:27As they start to translate, the first line grabs their attention.
03:31It reads, I will call you to remember, for goodness forever, God spoke all these words.
03:40Then, further down the stone, they identify other words.
03:45You shall not murder.
03:47You shall not commit adultery.
03:49You shall not steal.
03:50In the Bible, Kaplan has found a fully intact stone of the Ten Commandments
03:59that dates back to the era of the Old Testament.
04:03In 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 worshiping the golden calf.
04:16God later dictated the commandments back to Moses who inscribed them onto a second set of tablets in the 13th century BC.
04:25And then, according to the Bible, those tablets are stored in the Ark of the Covenant.
04:29But 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 a sacred site for Samaritans.
05:04Further research discovers that a Samaritan synagogue was built in the place where this stone tablet was found.
05:14That 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.
05:42Then 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.
05:57Bidding 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.
06:07The 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.
06:20Next, a different kind of sacred discovery, one frozen in time, high up in the Andes.
06:32On September 18th, 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,
06:51the sky fills with smoke and ash begins to rain down on them.
06:55The 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.
07:09As 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. She's wrapped in beautiful, colorful textiles,
07:42and 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.
08:00He 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, and then when he and the guide are down at the bottom,
08:18it takes another 13 hours to walk to the nearest village.
08:21Safely recovered, the mummy becomes known as Juanita and is an international sensation,
08:28hailed 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 and researchers
08:44determined that she was likely killed between the ages of 11 and 15.
08:49Cause of death, blunt force trauma to the head.
08:52But 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
09:05far more sacred than murder.
09:07Several of the items Johan finds with her remains are fashioned of precious metals.
09:14It'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.
09:26The figures and ceramics feature Incan designs, which suggest that Juanita had been sacrificed to
09:34the gods. Child 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. It may have been a plea to calm a furious natural force.
09:56Historians believe that the nearby Misti and Savancayo 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
10:09eruption less catastrophic. There's something almost poetic if you think about it, that Juanita may have
10:16been sacrificed to stop the eruption only to be discovered as the ash melted away and revealed her grave.
10:29Let's say you're a regular guy with a passion for scuba diving. You love looking at coral reefs
10:36and tropical fish. Then one day you accidentally spot something surprising under the waves.
10:46To 1998 in Guatemala, a local businessman named Roberto Samayoa is out enjoying one of his
10:53favorite pastimes, scuba diving in Lake Atitlan. This is a picturesque lake flanked by volcanoes and
11:02mountain peaks and charming villages.
11:05Around 50 feet below the surface, in very murky waters, Samayoa sees something out of place. He sees a shape start to emerge.
11:17Getting closer, he discovers it's a large stone structure. As he continues to explore,
11:25he finds a series of staircases, temples, plazas. This is not just one structure. In essence,
11:33it looks like some kind of underwater city.
11:36Samayoa reports his findings to local archaeologists, but no one believes him. Frustrated, he leaves the site
11:48untouched until 2007. Samayoa decides to take matters into his own hands. He dives upon his find once more,
12:00but this time he comes equipped with an underwater digital camera. He snaps a few photos and now everyone
12:08is beginning to believe him. Researchers spend the next five years using sonar to map out this underwater
12:17metropolis. What they uncover is more than ruins. It's the remains of a 2,500 year old Mayan city. Once
12:28thought 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.
12:45Within the ruins, they find 16 different religious structures and two saunas, which the Maya would use
12:51to cleanse themselves before religious ceremonies. And then there's a large central square with a stone
12:58altar and a sacred pillar at one end. When the Maya were thriving in this area around 350 BC to 250 AD,
13:07this city sat on an island in the middle of this lake. For centuries, Samabaj stood as a sacred sanctuary.
13:15So how did this entire ancient city wind up underwater?
13:19One of the volcanoes along the shore of Lake Atitlan erupted. Lava flowed down toward the lake and
13:29plugged up a drainage channel that carried overflow down the mountain. It's kind of like when you plug
13:34up your bathtub while the water's running, the water just continues to rise and rise and rise. By the time
13:40the water stopped rising, Samabaj was deep under the lake and stayed at a site for 1700 years until
13:48Samayoa found it. Ironically, the same water that drowned Samabaj helped preserve it. Because of the
13:56island'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. So thanks to that
14:08volcanic eruption combined with Samayoa's discovery, Samabaj is probably the most well-preserved site of
14:15Mayan culture to this day. From an ancient city lost below the waves to an even older site buried under
14:26the earth, our next story takes us to a hilltop in Turkey. Back in 1986 in southeastern Turkey, a farmer
14:37is plowing his property along the foothills of the Taurus Mountains. He reaches this area which is
14:43called 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
14:56equipment. The farmer's been trying to remove some of these stones. Most of them are too large to get
15:01out of the ground. But on this day in particular, one of these stones catches his attention.
15:08He takes a closer look and he clears away some of the surrounding dirt. It's a limestone statue of a human
15:14figure with finely carved eyes, nose and mouth. Below 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, but when the farmer threatens
15:36to throw it away, they do reach a compromise and decide to place the statue in the museum garden.
15:42The statue sits there until 1992 when a visiting archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt sees it.
15:49Dr. Schmidt has been doing excavation work nearby and recognizes this as a neolithic figure at least
15:56several thousand years old. He 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.
16:08And these large stones that keep getting in the farmer's way are actually the tops of limestone structures.
16:14Dr. Schmidt turns his attention to the mound and begins to dig.
16:23Not very long after these excavations began, archaeologists find massive limestone megaliths
16:29that 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.
16:55All 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,
17:13making it the oldest temple ever discovered in the world.
17:18It'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.
17:28It's age is astonishing, but what's even more surprising is how it was built.
17:37Schmidt estimates it would have taken over 500 people to build Gobekli.
17:43But humans were believed to be hunter-gatherers at this time,
17:47and this site suggests that there was much more intelligence, cooperation, and planning that went
17:53into this than archaeologists could have possibly thought.
17:57Gobekli Tepe was a truly epic feat of design and construction for its time.
18:04And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years, only to be discovered by chance,
18:10by a farmer makes that history even more extraordinary.
18:19When 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.
18:47To 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,
19:01the oldest public Catholic church in Rome, which was founded in 324.
19:08The 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.
19:23Then 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 9th century,
19:58which means they have found something incredibly special.
20:03These are the fortification walls that protected the original palace of the pope.
20:11Before the pope and the Catholic church were based in nearby Vatican City,
20:16the head of the church resided in an elaborate papal palace in the heart of Rome.
20:20It 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.
20:46In 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.
21:06In 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.
21:22When construction crews rediscovered the palace ruins 500 years later, archaeologists 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
21:47of 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.
22:10This 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, helmets, firearms or other military artifacts.
22:31As he's walking, his eye catches something half buried under the base of a tree.
22:36He realizes it's a wedge-shaped object.
22:41It's made of metal.
22:43But 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.
22:54Bukowski brings his discovery to a local museum, hoping their experts can shed some light on this find.
23:00There, archaeologist Zsagors 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.
23:17It's a lead papal bull seal, or bulla, used to authenticate papal decrees.
23:22Kurka 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.
23:37It has the pope's name.
23:40Unfortunately, this seal is cracked, but he's able to decipher certain things that give him clues
23:46as 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
23:59of one of four possible popes.
24:03Benedict XI, Clement V, Benedict XII, or Clement VI,
24:10all of which will date the seal between 1303 and 1352.
24:14Unfortunately, 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.
24:38Imagine finding an unusual stone in a pile of rubble,
24:42and learning it's covered in writing, dating back thousands of years.
24:46What happens next is an adventure story straight out of the movies.
24:52In 1868, a French missionary is traveling in what is now modern-day Jordan,
24:58delivering aid and spreading Christianity in the region.
25:01His work takes him to a small abandoned area near the village of Dubon,
25:06where something catches his eye.
25:07In 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.
25:33Later, he returns to Jerusalem and shows it to a friend,
25:39who thinks that the writing looks like Phoenician,
25:42an ancient script that was the foundation of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets.
25:46Soon, news of the Phoenician stone catches the ear of Charles Clermont Ghanot,
25:53a 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.
26:06A squeeze is a paper impression when the paper is wet, pressed in the inscription,
26:11and 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.
26:25Yacoub and the stone are surrounded by two Bedouin tribes,
26:31and it seems that the locals have understood that there's something significant about this monument,
26:36and they're now fighting over it.
26:37In the melee, the paper impression is torn up, and then suddenly,
26:47Yacoub gets stabbed in the leg.
26:49Yacoub 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,
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.
27:16According to the Bible, back in the 9th 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. It 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.
28:03They call it the Moabite stone.
28:06But as word spreads, the locals fear the stone will be plundered by Westerners.
28:13So they decide to destroy it.
28:14So they pour water on the stone and then they light a fire underneath it.
28:23When the water gets hot, it turns to steam and the steam expands
28:30and effectively blows the stone to pieces.
28:34The Moabite stone fragments are then hidden among the members of the local tribe.
28:40And Charles spends three years trying to find them.
28:44Initially, he's able to find 38 pieces and 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.
29:00In 1873, it makes its debut at the Louvre.
29:08It's an absolute sensation. People flock to get a personal look at this real-world piece of biblical history.
29:17And the story of how it was discovered, destroyed and pieced back together again only adds to the mystique of this relic.
29:302,000 miles away, another hidden box holds proof of a different kind of worshiped figure.
29:40In 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. A 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 and seeks fame
30:00and fortune in places like India and the Middle East.
30:03Charles, as he's known, is quite the character. During 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.
30:21In 1833, the British East India Company hires him to explore and document ancient sites in what's now Afghanistan.
30:31Charles arrives in the Gondara Valley and he sees there a series of ruined domed buildings and 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.
30:54Charles 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.
31:19This 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, about a thousand years before the arrival of Islam.
31:44While Charles thinks he's uncovered a treasure nearly 2,000 years old, it 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 Gondara.
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 like footprints, the lotus flower, or an empty throne.
32:29On this reliquary, the Buddha is clothed in a robe and holds up his hand in a mudra position.
32:35The 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, it's undeniable that he's also responsible for one of the most important Buddhist discoveries of all time.
33:05The 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.
33:23It's early 1976 in the Old City of Jerusalem.
33:26A 25-year-old engineer named Oded Goulart is looking through items in an antiquities market when his eye is drawn to a limestone box.
33:39The 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.
33:49Ossuaries 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.
34:04It was a way of dealing with space issues if you didn't have enough room for burials.
34:09They were often elaborately decorated.
34:11Sometimes the name of the person or a phrase was inscribed on the side.
34:15The box that Goulart discovers is relatively unremarkable, but on the front of it there is some script in a language that he doesn't recognize.
34:25He likes collecting antiques.
34:27The dealer isn't asking very much, so he buys the box for about $200 and puts it on a shelf in his parents' house.
34:33The box sits untouched for 26 years.
34:37Then, in 2001, Golan meets an ancient language expert named André Lemaire at a dinner party and asks for help deciphering the inscription on the box.
34:50Lemaire is amazed.
34:52It's written in Aramaic and it says on it, James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.
35:00Names 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, and he was a leader after Jesus' death of the first generation of Jesus' followers.
35:39We also know James the Just was martyred.
35:43He 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.
36:00Golan 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.
36:12This just happens to correlate historically with when James actually died.
36:18Then 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.
36:30They 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.
36:41Lemaire publishes his findings and then begins a press tour to publicize this amazing discovery.
36:48Even 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.
37:15They say history can be stranger than fiction, which is the case with what one young fisherman pulled from the sea in 2013.
37:24August 16, 2013, a young Palestinian fisherman named Judah Gorab takes his small boat out into the waters off the coast of Gaza.
37:34He'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.
37:47It looks like a man.
37:50So he's startled at first, but then curiosity gets the better of him.
37:55And 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.
38:09It's dark metal with hints of green and gold.
38:13And Judah wonders if he's found something valuable.
38:16But it's too heavy for him to lift by himself.
38:19Judah heads back to land, gathers up some friends and family, and they head back out.
38:26And 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.
38:46They're able to heave the statue onto a donkey cart and take it to Judah's house for closer inspection.
38:56The statue is a six-foot-tall naked man with dark curly hair.
39:02Judah thinks it's made of gold and that he's hit pay dirt.
39:08And then about a month later, the statue makes a surprise appearance on eBay.
39:12It 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,
39:38who identifies the statue as an incredibly well-preserved bronze of the Greco-Roman god Apollo.
39:45One of the 12 Olympians, Apollo is a son of Zeus, and he's the god of archery, music, truth, and healing.
39:54He'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,
40:13this 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.
40:28Immediately, police arrive to the statue's location and haul it away.
40:35Soon after, in 2023, war breaks out in the region,
40:40and news about the Apollo statue all but disappears.
40:44Whatever the fate of this particular statue,
40:48there 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,
41:05just waiting to be discovered.
41:06A long-lost papal palace,
41:12a statue of a Greek god,
41:14fragments of a priceless text.
41:16These are just some of the divine discoveries
41:19that give us new insight into the past.
41:23I'm Danny Trejo.
41:24Thanks for watching Mysteries on Earth.
41:27I'm Danny Trejo.
41:31I'm a extraordinary.
41:32I'm Dannyigkeiten.
41:36I'm Danny serves.
41:38Stevenfo Montale.
41:44Jason, you're gonna get a couple pounds or whatever.
41:46Yến, who you can't?
41:49I brought the overall motorcycle similar to作品.
41:52What did you say and requests that you'd like?
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