God's Gold (2 page)

Like many of the most exhilarating moments in my life, the seeds of this book go back to my work as a marine archaeologist along the shores of the ancient harbor of Dor in Israel. For falling asleep in our archaeological lab one stormy day in 1991, shrouded in the Jerusalem Post, and for unwittingly revealing a letter on its pages about the Temple treasure of Jerusalem, I am grateful to Kurt Raveh for the seeds of this quest.

Numerous scholars have generously given various forms of academic advice during my quest: Géza Alföldy, Rupert Chapman III, Amanda Claridge, Frank Clover, Shimon Dar, Ken Dark, Jerome Eisenberg, Stefania Fogagnolo, Shimon Gibson, Richard Hodges, Dalu Jones, Paolo Liverani, Jodi Magness, Eilat Mazar, Peter Clayton, and David Stacey. For other forms of information, thanks to Shuli Davidovich at the Israel Embassy, London; Philippe Van Nedervelde of E-Spaces; and to Gershon Salomon in Jerusalem. The template of the map used in this book was provided by Vince Gaffney and Henry Buglass from the Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity, the University of Birmingham.

Eric McFadden and Italo Vecchi of the Classical Numismatic Group Inc. patiently answered endless questions about Roman coins and modern value equivalents. From Jerusalem, Ibrahim Raï (Abou George) carefully drove me into the West Bank and shared a fright for the cause.

Due to its politically and religiously controversial subject matter, this book was written under a veil of secrecy. For the necessary smoke screens, I offer apologies to all of the above.

At HarperCollins I am especially indebted to my editor, Claire Wachtel, for her guidance and faith in the book; special thanks also are extended to Lauretta Charlton, David Koral, and Muriel Jorgensen, for her hawk-eyed copyediting. Vivienne Schuster at Curtis Brown and George Lucas at InkWell Management have been beacons of support, enthusiasm, and advice. Special thanks are due to Josie Lloyd and Emlyn Rees for their ambassadorial generosity, and to Mark Merrony for reading and commenting on the text and for his friendship and encouragement. Dorothy King has also been generous and wise with her advice and support.

As ever, the highs and lows of writing are shouldered by family, and for their understanding, interest, and belief, endless thanks to Andrew and Sally. However, the star of this production is Madeleine Kingsley, a veritable Old Testament matriarch with unrivaled energy and passion, who read and advised on the manuscript with boundless enthusiasm despite huge pressures on her time. She is a source of constant inspiration. This book is for her and the family and roots she lost during the brutality of World War II.

 

Permissions to reproduce ancient sources have been kindly granted by Elizabeth Jeffreys (The Chronicle of John Malalas); Cyril Mango (The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor); John Moorhead (Victor of Vita); and the Loeb Classical Library of Harvard University Press (Ammianus Marcellinus III, translated by J. C. Rolfe; Cicero X, translated by C. Macdonald; Pliny: Natural History IV, translated by H. Rackham; Pliny: Natural History X, translated by D. E. Eicholz; Procopius of Caesarea: Buildings, translated by H. B. Dewing). Very special thanks to Sebastian Brock for permission to reproduce from his unpublished translation of The Khuzistan Chronicle.

Full reference to these titles is provided in the select bibliography.

Every effort has been made to obtain reproduction permission for all titles in copyright cited in this book. The author and publisher will include any omission in subsequent reprints.

AJ:
Josephus,
Antiquities of the Jews

HVP:
Victor of Vita,
History of the Vandal Persecution

JW:
Josephus,
Jewish War

Legends of the Jews:
L. Ginzberg,
Legends of the Jews,
I–IV

On Moses:
Philo of Alexandria,
Questions and Answers in Exodus

Pro Flacco:
Cicero X

Secret History:
Procopius,
The Secret History

Wars:
Procopius,
History of the Wars

Jerusalem was lost, its ashes returned to the soil that gave birth to the holiest city on earth an eternity ago. The end of the world was nigh—just as the omens of impending doom had foretold. For months, strange portents had petrified the High Priests. A sword-shaped star hung over the great Jewish Temple; across Israel, chariots cavorted past the setting sun and armed battalions hurtled through the clouds. During the festival of Passover a sacrificial cow inexplicably gave birth to a lamb in the Temple court, surely the work of the devil. And finally the eastern gate of the Temple's inner court, crafted of bronze and so monumental that twenty men could hardly move it, opened of its own accord in the middle of the night. Terrified High Priests swore they heard the voice of God proclaim, “We are departing hence.” The day was September 26
in the year 70, and Rome had just crushed the last drop of life out of the First Jewish Revolt of Israel.

Battleground Jerusalem was hell on earth, an inferno of blood, smoke, and tears. With typical Roman efficiency imperial troops razed the city. Fire consumed the Temple, one of the great wonders of the world. The holiest place on earth, where Abraham had prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac to the Lord, was an inferno. The graceful architecture of the 500-foot-long precinct—the largest religious forum of classical antiquity—was one immense fireball.

Satanic flames danced across stores of holy oil used in animal sacrifice, shooting columns of fire and thick plumes of smoke high into the night's sky. The air reeked with the stench of burning flesh. Some Jewish zealots had been put to flight, while the bodies of other Jewish revolutionaries lay piled across the altar steps of the Temple's Holy of Holies. As the corpses burned, the cedar roof crumbled and the gold-plated ceiling crashed onto the elegant marble paving below, entombing the holy warriors.

All across the upper city, once home to the rich and famous of Jerusalem, fortunes were going up in smoke. Villas as opulent as any gracing the Bay of Naples, playground of Rome's aristocrats, fell to Titus's ruthless soldiers. No one had ever dared lock horns with the empire so brazenly. The result would be death and destruction.

Amid a landscape of Armageddon, the groans of hundreds of crucified Jews cut the night. Wooden crosses lined the streets as far as the eye could see. Roman soldiers maliciously taunted dying Jews with wine and beer; others downed food in front of famished prisoners who had not touched a morsel in days. The noose of the siege had strangled the city, and starvation alone would cause 11,000 deaths inside beleaguered Jerusalem. Jews over seventeen years old were chained together in readiness for the long march south to Egypt's desert, where forced labor awaited them in the imperial gold and granite mines; Jews under seventeen were simply sold into slavery.

And yet these were the fortunate minority: 1.1 million Jews were allegedly killed across Israel during the First Jewish Revolt. A further
97,000 prisoners became fodder for gladiatorial games in the Roman provinces, butchered by sword or wild beast in the name of entertainment. Perhaps these “performers” would have preferred crucifixion rather than death in a distant land in front of a crowd of foreigners baying for blood in alien tongues they could not fathom. All across the Temple Mount, Roman troops flushed out the revolutionaries hiding in dunghills and the rat-infested underground passages honeycombing the Temple complex.

At the end of one of the bloodiest and most savage battles of history, Rome was getting high on the spoils of war. Rumors abounded that the Temple was stuffed with the most fabulous and rarest treasures in the world. Jews trying to desert the front line and escape Jerusalem had taken to swallowing gold coins in a desperate attempt to conceal their surviving valuables from the enemy. But following a tip-off, Romans soldiers and their Arabian and Syrian mercenaries had reveled in slicing open and disemboweling Jewish deserters. Even though Titus expressly forbade this barbarism, 2,000 Jews were dissected on one night alone. The hunger for war booty was intoxicating.

But this was just loose change. The vision of the Temple, plated throughout with gold, had inspired the Roman soldiers during ferocious battles. They rightly assumed its secret storerooms overflowed with wealth, and they were thrilled to find vast money chests, piles of garments, and other valuables within the treasury chambers. Since the Temple was a sanctuary both holy and fortified, many High Priests and aristocrats had transferred their own personal wealth to this supposedly secure repository over the months. Now as fire consumed the dry cedar timbers, the precious wall plating melted into a river of gold at the soldiers' feet.

While low-ranking Roman soldiers dreamed of a little plunder to soften the blows of a weary battle campaign and to impress their wives and families back home, their generals were privately negotiating a highly delicate deal to secure the greatest sacred treasure known to man. Inside the Jewish sanctuary lay items of immeasurable wealth and religious value, the very symbols of state passed down from generation to generation and locked away in the Temple's secret places.

The High Priests knew they were cornered like rats in a sinking ship—nowhere to go other than into Roman chains or through the gates of heaven. So it did not take long for Titus to cut a deal with the priest Jesus, son of Thebuthi, who, in return for a royal pardon, handed over the wall of the sanctuary two candelabrums, along with tables, bowls, and platters, all crafted of solid gold. Next Jesus gave up the exquisitely woven veils that divided the Holy of Holies from the impure outside world, alongside the High Priests' belongings, precious stones, and many other religious objects used in public worship. Once taken prisoner, Phineas—the Temple treasurer—also disclosed purple and scarlet tunics and girdles worn by the priests, a mass of cinnamon, cassia, and other spices, as well as a mountain of treasures and sacred ornaments. Suddenly Titus and his father, the emperor Vespasian, were rich beyond their wildest dreams.

 

W
hile Titus and his troops mopped up Jerusalem and jostled and joked about marching south to relax amid the luxuries of the great port city of Alexandria—with its baths, brothels, and fine wines from the shores of Lake Mareotis—the harbor of Sebastos at Caesarea witnessed an altogether different scene. A crack unit of two hundred army officers sped to Israel's chief port under a veil of secrecy. In the dead of night they slipped into the city by the back gate near the amphitheater and followed the shadows down to the shore. Only eighty years old, King Herod's harbor had been built from 22 to 10 BC to honor the emperor Augustus and as a port of call for Egyptian grain destined for Rome. With its streets of temples, vaulted warehouses, fountains, latrines, and inns, Sebastos was a bastion of
romanitas—
Rome away from home.

At the far tip of the breakwater, a fleet of warships was moored menacingly by the inner harbor. Rapidly and without ceremony, rugged officers lugged heavy straw baskets deep into the ships' holds—the Temple treasure of Jerusalem—as the remainder of the troops sealed off the area. After an hour of toil, the operation ceased as abruptly as it had started. The air was calm and windless; waves softly caressed the shore.
Suddenly, a procession of three priests swinging gold incense censers, accompanied by six generals, descended from the darkness of the Temple of Augustus and Rome fronting the port along the quay and carefully stepped up the gangway of the largest warship. “Lift anchor,” barked a general clad in bronze breastplates embossed with the personification of the smiling goddess of victory, Victoria.

The ship's captain acknowledged the order by shining a bronze oil-lamp overboard. For a split second the pitch-black night was pierced, silhouetting a white-robed figure with a long priestly beard, clutching close to his chest a seven-pronged golden candelabrum. The spoils from the Temple of Jerusalem, razed not a week before, were on their way to Rome.

A fierce storm ripped along the coast of Israel as I stood on the beach at the ancient port of Dor in May 1991. Just eight miles to the south, the ghostly outline and blinking lights of the power station at Caesarea hulked among the sea mist, close to the spot where King Herod's lighthouse once welcomed sea-battered sailors home to port. The howling wind and swirling sand threatened to take my head off. Cafés rushed to secure their shutters and villagers of the Carmel took to the roofs to escape rising rainwater. Even hardy Arab fishermen, who had spent all their lives on the moody Mediterranean Sea, dragged their boats high onto beaches and battened down their hatches. As they savored thick, muddy coffee from within a ruined Ottoman house they nodded wisely. This was one of the great storms that ravage this quiet backwater of the eastern Mediterranean once or twice a generation.

The storm meant bad news for me. After the First Gulf War ended following Saddam Hussein's invasion into oil-rich Kuwait, I had packed my snorkel, wet suit, and underwater camera to work as a marine archaeologist in Israel. I had cofounded the Dor Maritime Archaeology Project to explore ancient shipwrecks in the waters of Dor, a city of Canaanite origin perched on a rocky promontory midway between Caesarea and Haifa. This ancient port city is a well-kept secret hidden among a breathtaking landscape. Its tantalizing waters conceal myriad unanswered secrets about the ancient maritime world. The concoction
of rich history, archaeology, and outstanding natural beauty is magical; in a place like this you awake each morning tingling with excitement at the endless promise of a new day.

For several weeks I had dived the ancient sea-lanes, spending more time underwater than on land, scouring a seabed choked with ton upon ton of sand blankets that it would take lifetimes to remove by hand or even with the help of powerful airlifts, underwater vacuum cleaners. The underwater visibility was astonishingly clear but revealed only a desert of sand and shell. Frustrated, my project codirector and diving partner, Kurt Raveh, and I yearned to learn what lay beneath. Day after day we lived in hope of finding the preserved timbers of a Phoenician or Roman ship peering out of the sediments.

With growing impatience we watched the storm wreak havoc. I killed time in our laboratory, drawing the few fragments of Roman terra-cotta wine jars discovered so far. This was a long way to come for a bag of broken crockery, a very small return for a gamble in life at a time when my peers were climbing corporate ladders and socializing with fine foods and wines. Fidgeting over lost time, I pulled the back page off the
Jerusalem Post
Kurt had been reading before he fell into deep slumber on the office sofa.

While chilling spring winds made me shiver and dream of English fish and chips drenched in salt and vinegar, a small headline tucked away on the back page caught my attention. Israel's minister of culture had sent a formal letter to the Vatican demanding return of the Temple treasure looted from Jerusalem in AD 70. The Eternal City stood accused of deliberately imprisoning this national birthright deep in its dusty, centuries-old storerooms.

To my scientific mind, any idea that this treasure might have survived 2,000 years sounded frankly ludicrous—at least at first. After all, war and greed have robbed mankind of so many great artistic wonders of classical antiquity. The original Greek bronze statues fashioned by the master craftsmen Myron, Pheidias, and Polykleitos were largely melted down in antiquity. Where are the 120,000 talents of gold and silver, the enormous chests stuffed with jewels
and gold that Alexander the Great looted from Persepolis in Iran in 330 BC? What happened to these spoils after they were carried away on 10,000 mules and 5,000 camels, according to the ancient writers Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch? The once fabulously wealthy interiors of the Greeks' treasuries,
thesauroi,
uncovered at the oracles of Delphi, Olympia, and Gela are all barren today. Why should Jerusalem's loot be any different?

The storm waves still pounded the shore and lightning illuminated pewter gray skies—plenty of time for a little mental excavation and welcome distraction. From my years of studying classical civilizations, a distant bell rang in my head as I recalled a historical reference to this very treasure being showcased by the emperor Vespasian in a triumph in Rome following the bloody subjugation of Palestine. Pen in mouth I pulled a dog-eared copy of Flavius Josephus's
Jewish War
from the dusty lab shelf.

Some of the detail that Josephus describes, particularly statistics, has to be taken with plenty of pinches of salt. But as Kurt snored and fishermen played cards in ruined shacks along the shore, I read how in AD 71 looted silver, gold, and ivory ran along the streets of Rome like a river of wealth. Pageants on floats up to four stories high reenacted the bloody siege of Jerusalem, with the Temple on fire and ships clashing in sea battles. Meanwhile, humiliated Jewish military leaders were dragged in chains in front of the triumphant emperor and son.

According to Josephus, the most impressive moment was the passing of the Temple spoils: a heavy golden table and a seven-branched golden candelabrum (menorah). As the triumph reached its conclusion at the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, a silence gripped the crowd as Simon, son of Giora and commander of the Jewish revolt, was executed in the Forum.

Amazingly, Josephus explicitly tells us that once the excitement of the triumph died down:

This revelation made my senses tingle. A wave of adrenaline shot through my body. Could this report be historically accurate, or was it the kind of hyperbole of which Josephus is so often guilty? Did the holy treasures of Herod's Temple find a home in the Eternal City? If so, were they eventually melted down for liquid capital? If not, what was their fate during the fifth-century Gothic and Vandal invasions? Could they even still survive today?

The very idea was exhilarating. If true, the implications for humanity were enormous. Not only would this treasure be worth a king's ransom of hundreds of millions of dollars, but as the symbolic insignia of a people lost and found—Judaism and the modern state of Israel—the political implications were highly sensitive, even dangerous.

The following day the skies cleared and the sea ceased to swirl. We dived eagerly and found that ten-foot-deep sand blankets covering the seabed had been blasted away by the force of a thousand sea horses in a single storm, exposing parts of Dor's ancient harbor floor never before seen by the human eye.

Throughout those heady spring and summer days we found twelve shipwrecks along a 260-foot-long stretch of seabed—the richest concentration in the eastern Mediterranean—recovering a fifth-century BC Greek war helmet, Roman bronze bowls, and, gratifyingly, the noble timbers of those elusive Late Roman wooden hulls. I got my hands on more ancient pottery than I could ever have wished for. To my corporate friends this may have looked like old garbage, but to me it was living history, a vast jigsaw puzzle that had important historical stories to tell. In those days I wouldn't have swapped my museum of broken
pots for a case of champagne. As I lived through the most invigorating time of my life, recording the archaeology, participating in television documentaries, and writing articles, the riddle of Titus, Josephus, and the case of the missing Jewish treasure was relegated to a back drawer of my mind for ten long years—stored away germinating, but never erased from memory.