God's Gold (3 page)

Strange how past memories resurface when you least expect. By 2001 I had swapped my face mask and wet suit for reading glasses and a smart suit to edit
Minerva
, the International Review of Ancient Art and Archaeology. Fighting crowds to work in London's West End was a very long way from those heady days of shipwreck exploration in Israel.

Each morning I would ritually savor my first cup of life-sustaining coffee while scanning the latest newspaper clippings for ancient ruins making the news. As a familiar time traveler into antiquity, most of the stories that found their way into the papers were old news to me; hot discoveries were rare. However, I was always alert for an exception to the rule that might give us a scoop over the magazine competition.

One memorable day in August 2001 I spluttered on my coffee, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head as I read a story publicizing the opening of the Blood and Sand in the Colosseum exhibition in Rome. The Amphitheatrum Flavium, as it was originally called, was one of the engineering wonders of classical antiquity, a four-story entertainment facility started by the emperor Vespasian in AD 72 and finished by his son, the emperor Titus, in AD 80. When complete, the Colosseum boasted eighty entrances, was 620 feet long, 158 feet high, seated fifty thousand people, and was by far the largest amphitheater of the Roman Empire. The noise and atmosphere generated by this stone theater of death must have been terrifying, unlike any of today's comparatively
tame entertainment facilities, even Madison Square Garden on a world championship boxing night.

To the side of the Colosseum's main entrance is a massive marble lintel that once spanned a major passageway. Until very recently it lay idly on the ground, neglected by the 3 million visitors passing by each year. Ancient relics like these simply litter Rome. However, this turned out to be no ordinary stone. Since 1813 historians have been familiar with a Latin inscription running across its front surface referring to a restoration of the Colosseum sponsored by Rufius Caecina Felix Lampadius in AD 443–444, interesting and useful in its own right for working out the complex surgery that this monument has been subjected to over the decades.

Far more compelling, though, are a series of sixty-seven small holes studded across the lintel's surface, half an inch deep, that originally pegged in position bronze letters from a far earlier inscription. Once Lampadius decided to reuse this piece of architecture, the original bronze letters were melted down. So today all that remain are the empty holes from this earlier “phantom” inscription.

On that stifling summer's day in August 2001, in an office down Old Bond Street, I was intrigued to read how Professor Géza Alf öldy from the University of Heidelberg, an expert in so-called ghost epigraphy, had reconstructed three lost lines of Latin beneath the fifth-century inscription:

IMP(ERATOR) T(ITUS) CAES(AR) VESPASIANVS VG(VSTVS) AMPHITHEATRVM NOVVM
EX MANVBIS FIERI IVSSIT

The importance of this inscription, dating to AD 79, far exceeds the massive weight of the lintel, and can be translated as:

Titus never served as a general before going to war in Judea where he earned his spurs, so the
manubiae
(spoils) can only have been those plundered from the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70.

The looting of Jerusalem must have had a huge impact on Rome's economy. The holy Temple was a massive gold mine. This lintel, a living piece of history that has endured the centuries, was clear confirmation that Josephus had been reporting fact all along. Jerusalem's treasures did make it to Rome, impacting powerfully on the everyday landscape not only of the pagan city of antiquity but also the contemporary skyline.

The success of Vespasian and Titus over the First Jewish Revolt of Israel had brought the empire spoils beyond its wildest dreams, exceeding the exploits of all of Rome's celebrated rulers. Just how much of Flavian Rome was built from Jewish blood money? Josephus leaves us in no doubt of the enormity of the windfall:

The cities and towns of the Near East were simply saturated with Temple gold and, as the Colosseum's phantom inscription verifies, Vespasian's slice of the bounty was easily sufficient to sponsor the grandest entertainment facility the ancient world had ever boasted. Recent estimates put the cost of the Colosseum's foundations alone at $55.6 million of today's money (excluding labor, drainage, and any superstructure). The end product must have been closer to $195 million. The enormity of the Temple treasure was also sufficient to bankroll the foundations of the entire Flavian dynasty (AD 69–96) from Vespasian to Domitian. The economic windfall of the looting of the Temple in Jerusalem is estimated to have brought the treasury of Rome an immense fifty tons of gold and silver.

As I grappled with this exciting revelation, I recalled the shores of Dor and the ferocious storm of May 1991. Now intrigue had been replaced by scientific curiosity. When I contacted Professor Alföldy to congratulate him on his discovery and confirm a few details, his reply
was modest but telling: “Now we know what happened with this immense booty.”

By the end of the same week I had completed and submitted a short article in
Minerva
titled “The Roman Siege of Jerusalem and Fate of the Spoils of War.” Once again I was consumed by curiosity, not so much amazement and awe at the scale of the treasures as a resolute determination to know precisely what happened to the mighty gold candelabrum, the Table of the Divine Presence, and the silver trumpets looted from Jerusalem—one of the greatest and most important lost treasures of history. My mind was in turmoil. I couldn't sleep. I would have liked to close the offices of
Minerva
then and there to head straight to Jerusalem and Rome in search of answers. But reality bit and magazine deadlines pressed.

Intrigue had turned into an obsession. Already I found myself processing the lost Temple treasure story through a critical series of scientific filters. Why did Rome destroy King Herod's Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70? Was it done deliberately or just as an unavoidable by-product of war? If the Jewish loot really made it to Rome, did it survive the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century? When did the gold candelabrum—symbol of a displaced civilization—finally disappear from the pages of history?

With so many unanswered questions, I pledged to unravel the truth about one of the most important, yet neglected, stories of history. During the next four years I would circle the Mediterranean twice on this quest, visiting four of the greatest cities of antiquity—Jerusalem, Rome, Carthage, and Constantinople—clarifying some questions, burying others as red herrings, and uncovering a web of facts more startling than any work of fiction. The journey drew me to dangerous places and people that reminded me of the archaeological proverb: treasure is trouble.

Inspired in 2001 by the revelations of the Colosseum's phantom inscription, I itched to jump on a plane and head for the Eternal City. Just as all roads led to Rome 2,000 years ago, so the threads of the Temple treasure now seemed to converge there. Preliminary research flagged Rome as the crucial link in the disappearance of the Jewish spoils—the Temple of Peace seemed to be the last place where they were spotted in public. Or so I thought at the time.

But for now I would have to resist the lure of Rome. First, I needed to separate fact from fiction amid the epic story of the empire's destruction of Israel in AD 70. At the moment the quest felt abstract: I was hunting down a monumental treasure without having clearly unraveled why Rome had attacked Israel in AD 66 and how the war unfolded.

If I was going to track down the Temple treasure of Jerusalem successfully, I needed to evaluate its physical, spiritual, and monetary value to the Roman Empire and the Jews of ancient Israel. Without creating an historical, political, and psychological profile, the spoils would lack context. Imagine investigating a murder scene without dusting for fingerprints or taking samples for DNA analysis. You would have no forensic evidence—case closed. My attitude toward the Temple treasure was exactly the same.

I needed to turn the clock back to the moment when the Temple fell, to reconstruct the final weeks of the siege and assess Titus's rationale for razing Jerusalem. Had he plotted with his father, the emperor
Vespasian, to deliberately burn down the Temple so they could stuff the imperial coffers with Jewish blood money? If so, perhaps they liquidated all of the treasure. After the great fire of Rome in AD 64, the Eternal City was certainly an eyesore badly in need of a face-lift. Did the Temple treasure pay for these renovations?

In art and literature the image of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem has assumed legendary status. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas famously presented the Ark of the Covenant as an omnipotent force of divine power in
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
capable of wiping out Nazi units at the lift of a lid. In this profile the movie moguls were deeply inspired by the ark's biblical military prowess against enemies of the Israelites. More recently,
National Treasure
saw Nicolas Cage successfully hunt down Solomon's treasure beneath the sewers of New York.

A few books have flirted with the theme of Jerusalem's Temple treasure but, astonishingly, without defining its character. Rennes-le-Château in southern France has long been a stomping ground for conspiracy theorists wondering how the local parish priest, Bérenger Saunière, got his hands on vast riches around 1885. But books such as Guy Patton and Robin Mackness's
Sacred Treasure, Secret Power: The True History of the Web of Gold
(2000) make no attempt to define the treasure they seek. How can you hope to find, let alone understand, such a treasure on this basis? Elsewhere, the eccentric spiritual leader of the Parker Expedition to Jerusalem in 1909–1911, Valter H. Juvelius, anticipated discovering riches beyond his wildest dreams beneath the Temple Mount: a $200 million treasure hidden away when King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed Solomon's Temple in 586 BC. Following nocturnal probing of the Dome of the Rock, local rumor ran wild with speculation that the Crown and Ring of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Sword of Muhammed had all been plundered. They hadn't. But what artistic wonders did the Temple really conceal in AD 70?

Truth is a rare commodity in the zealous world of treasure hunting, where the fertility of the human mind finds the perfect playground. This is a field where clairvoyants are known to swing rings over maps
to locate shipwrecked treasure and where virtually any method is employed in the pursuit of glory. Far from being restricted to Western greed, treasure hunting was already common in nineteenth-century Palestine. Writing in
Pictured Palestine
in 1891, James Neil colorfully described a common tendency to hide wealth in the ground in an Ottoman world where banks and security of property were unavailable:

In
Domestic Life in Palestine
(1862), Mary Eliza Rogers explained how the medium was coerced to pronounce:

Just what riches these speculators hunted down in the soils of Palestine will never be known. In reality, however, the various methods initiated to track down the Temple treasure of Jerusalem have turned up nothing more to date than old horseshoes. To seek the Temple spoils or to write about their effects on later history, without determining what these treasures actually consisted of, is to construct a house of straw.

 

U
nraveling the mystery of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem hinges on two points in time, historical periods that could not be more culturally different. The first is the biblical story of the Exodus, when proto-Israelite groups wandered in the wilderness of Sinai around the end of the thirteenth century BC before establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel. The second fixed point dates to AD 81, when the Arch of Titus was built on the summit of the Sacred Way in Rome's Forum. The scene depicted in its remarkable wall relief is the equivalent of a detailed photograph of its age. Some form of table is carried at shoulder height on wooden poles; two cylindrical trumpets with flaring mouths are tied to its frontal plane. Behind, a seven-branched candelabrum is marched conspicuously through an archway. But what connects these two moments in time, the first from the dawn of organized religion, the second associated with the peak of pagan worship and the zenith of Roman civilization?

The answer is God's detailed instructions to Moses about the formation and doctrine of Judaism in the biblical book of Exodus. Here the first record of the dominant symbols of the Jewish faith are plucked out of the thin air to become constant beacons of faith for the next 3,500 years. If you want to try to fathom the composition of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem in AD 70, you have to focus on the Arch of Titus. But to set the spoils depicted in an accurate context, you must start with Exodus. Only in this way is it possible to determine whether the Arch of Titus menorah, table, and trumpets were original heirlooms passed down the centuries or products of the Roman era.

In the book of Exodus, the central tenets of First and Second Temple Judaism (tenth century BC to late first century AD)—sacrificial
worship based around a single “temple,” commandments, and objects of worship—emerge in fully developed form. The language used is precise, leaving no room for error. For instance, two one-year-old lambs must be sacrificed daily, one in the morning and one in the evening, offered with one-tenth of choice flour mixed with one-fourth beaten oil and one-fourth of wine (Exodus 29:38–46). During his lengthy dialogue with God on Mount Sinai, Moses was bombarded with information—the prophet must have possessed a fine memory.

Exodus 25:1–9 instructs:

Even though the Tabernacle was only a glorified portable reed tent inspired by Late Bronze Age architecture—essentially little more physically than those gracing Bedouin camps today—from the very beginning it was furnished with fine art and precious metals. The Ark of the Covenant, for instance, was decorated with two gold cherubim with spread wings (Exodus 25:18–20), and the Court of the Tabernacle contained twenty pillars and twenty bases of bronze to the south, covered with silver bands and beads (Exodus 27:10–11). The sanctuary also featured a bronze basin and washstand to maintain the cleanliness of Aaron and his priestly sons. A central feature of early Judaism, ritual purity, is also embedded within the religion from the very beginning: “They shall wash their hands and their feet, so that they may not die: it shall be a perpetual ordinance for them, for him and his descendants throughout their generations” (Exodus 30:21). The dazzling array of
mikvaot
—ritual cleansing pools—surrounding the ancient site of Qumran on the shore of the western Dead Sea, not to mention those scattered behind the Temple Mount today, attest to the longevity of this religious observance.

Equally remarkable were the demands for priestly clothing passed down to Moses, which offer a startling insight into the wealth associated with the central Jewish sanctuary throughout the ages. These were lavishly decorated, making the High Priests literally shine in the presence of God:

From the elaborate essence of Exodus, the word of God offered vast opportunities for architectural and artistic embellishment over time. If you accept the Bible verbatim, the tenth century BC witnessed a watershed in building and an economic boom for the fledgling nation of Israel. At this time, “Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand by the sea; they ate and drank and were happy. Solomon was sovereign over all the kingdoms from the Euphrates to the land of the Philistines, even to the border of Egypt” (1 Kings 4:20–21). With his mighty 40,000 stalls of horses for his chariots and 12,000 horsemen, this wisest of ruler was lord of all he surveyed.

The First Temple built by King Solomon was one of the wonders of the age. Enormous financial resources were invested in the new sanctuary and political alliances exploited to turn a dream into reality. King Hiram of Tyre arranged for Lebanese cedars to be floated down the Mediterranean Sea to Israel in return for annual tribute of 20,000 cors of wheat and 20 cors of fine oil (1 Kings 5:23–25). Solomon sent shifts
of 10,000 people into Lebanon each month to speed up the construction business, and dispatched 70,000 laborers and 80,000 stonecutters into the hill country of Judea.

The Bible describes Solomon's Temple as 60 cubits long and 20 cubits wide (100 x 33 feet), with a timber inner sanctuary overlaid with pure gold. Much of the cedar wood was sculpted with cherubim, palm trees, gourds, and open flowers, while the floor of the inner and outer rooms was again overlaid with gold. The entrance door to the inner sanctuary repeated the same decorative scheme, but this time the artwork was overlaid with gold (1 Kings 6:2–20, 29–32). The Temple sounds as if it must have been a major drain on regional gold resources, mined in the legendary land of Ophir—probably either Ethiopia or Yemen:

Mirroring the Tabernacle sanctuary of the wilderness, the king also housed two monumental gilt-veneered olive wood cherubim within the inner sanctuary, each 16 feet wide (1 Kings 6:23–28). The bronzes adorning the Temple were equally staggering. Hiram the bronze-worker of the tribe of Naphtali, resident in Tyre, was commissioned to cast two bronze pillars in the Temple vestibule known as Jachin and Boaz. Each was 30 feet high and 20 feet wide. Two vast bronze capitals capped each pillar, each 8.2 feet high and decorated with 200 bronze pomegranates (1 Kings 7:15–22). Next Hiram crafted the “cast sea,” essentially a 16-foot-wide cauldron that could hold the equivalent of 2,000 baths, with a brim shaped like the flower of a lily standing on twelve cast oxen (1 Kings 7:23–26). This was accompanied by ten bronze basins, each capable of holding the equivalent of forty baths (1 Kings 7:38). Finally, the master craftsman modeled ten bronze stands decorated with lions, oxen, and cherubim, each standing on four bronze wheels (1 Kings
7:27–37). To these artistic masterpieces were added the treasures of King David.