Fortune and Glory

by David McIntee

  Horon was a small city about 10 miles north-west of Jerusalem, while on the south side of Jerusalem, the modern Kibbutz Ramat Rachel is on the site of what used to be Beth Hakerem.

  Absolom’s Tomb/Memorial/Monument is one of those that depends whose translation you like best. Near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem there is a 1st-century structure called Absolom’s Tomb, which is the name John Allegro gave to the Absolom entry in his translation. This is the Kidron Valley. It’s known that there’s a cistern at that spot – an underground water tank/reservoir, already dug before the scroll was written, and therefore handy for stashing loot in – but excavation on the Temple Mount is forbidden, so nobody has dug it up. There was, however, also an Absalom’s Monument, as per the Milik and Official translations, and this was in the Ancient Royal Valley, the Rephaim Valley. This site, however, runs a mile or so south-west from the southern end of Jerusalem. Take your pick as to which site is more likely.

  Mount Garizim was the site of a Samaritan temple to the Hebrew God. Beth Shem is perhaps an abbreviation or error for Beth-shemesh, a city that lay about 19 miles west of Jerusalem (and was associated with Samson in legend).

  The École Biblique were also digging around the neighbouring site of Ein Feshkha at the time they were dealing the Copper Scroll translation, and so, unsurprisingly, this site has also become associated with the scroll locations. This was an oasis closer to the Dead Sea, not far from Wadi Qelt, and once was a farming town, though only low remnants of walls remain. The oasis had a spring flowing into the Dead Sea. In the scroll, there’s mention of a place called Beth-Tamar, ‘house of the date palm’ – which is what Ein Feshkha was, back in the day. They grew date palms to make wine from, you see. Likewise, there were underground cisterns there to collect the juice from the harvested and pressed dates, into which loot could easily be stashed, and there are a lot of such cisterns mentioned in the scroll. According to ground-penetrating radar, there are some anomalies underground which could be some of these cisterns, or geological features. Or treasure, who knows?

  The search would be a lot easier, of course, if the other copper scroll had been found. Oh yeah, there are two, and the one we know about is just the edited highlights version. It includes an ‘also available’ in the form of ‘A copy of this inventory, its explanation and details of every item is in the dry underground cavity that is in the smooth rock north of Kohlit.’

  The problem is nobody quite knows where this Kohlit – mentioned in several columns of the scroll’s text – was or is. There was a region called Kohlit on the east side of the River Jordan, but this wasn’t a single place; it was a wide area, big enough to encompass 60-odd towns and villages (which were conquered by Alexander Jannaeus in the 1st century BC). There’s nothing in the scroll to narrow the location down, and so none of the specific descriptions match a single place.

  Interestingly, there is a single city called K’eley Kohlit in Ethiopia. Given the legends linking the Ark of the Covenant with Ethiopia, and the fewer legends linking the Ark with the scrolls, it’s perhaps surprising that nobody has yet produced a gold-embossed paperback expose claiming that the Ethiopian Kohlit is the one where the Copper Scroll treasure is hidden.

  Other potential sites, especially obscure ones, are most likely between Jerusalem (where the treasures presumably came from) and the Dead Sea, where the scroll was hidden. It’s logical to assume the Essenes or the priesthood stashed the loot on the way. Also, the same road was an ancient road between Jerusalem and Jericho, so the route may have had treasure cached all the way along it.

  The Essenes aren’t quite the only suspects in having hidden the treasure, though. Some other scholars think the treasure belonged not to the Second Temple but to the elite citizenry of Jerusalem – a rich city in the 1st century – living on Mount Zion. Jerusalem was a rabbit warren of tunnels and cisterns, so there were plenty of underground hiding places.

  According to this theory, the treasure is made up of the possessions of many families, all gathered together to be hidden out of reach of the Romans. This does, however, fly in the face of the scroll itself listing several of the caches as being comprised of priestly garb and equipment, and items that would be more Temple-related than just flush-with-cash citizen-related.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that Milik and de Vaux’s theory that it was all fictional is pretty much now accepted as wrong, and that treasure really was hidden around the region and inventoried in the scroll.

  The bad news is that it has probably all been found and spent in the nearly two millennia since then. Several locations, as described above, have been identified, but with no treasure remaining to be found in them. There is, however, that vessel of sacred oil found in 1988. Likewise, the deposit listed as being in the ‘Cave of columns’ – the 25th item on the scroll – is also thought to have been found.

  In 1960, a number of ritual implements made of bronze were found buried 4½ft under a cave now called the ‘Cave of Letters’. Its description, however, matches the description of the Cave of Columns with two openings, which was listed in the Scroll as the site for a cache of priestly tools bured three cubits down. And three cubits is 4½ft. There was also a broken stoneware jar and fragments of another scroll. The finders thought these were Roman items stolen by revolutionaries in AD 132, but this makes little sense. Why would revolutionaries carefully bury captured enemy gear? And, of course, the fact that it was buried right where the Copper Scroll says ritual items would be found also mitigates against them being Roman items.

  That said, the pieces of pottery do have representations of the Roman goddess Thetis on them – but Herod, whose temple the stuff probably came from, was a pro-Roman king, who presided over a Romanization of the culture.

  Where are they now? On display at Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book.

  As for the rest of the hoard, there has been almost 2,000 years for the Bedouin, Crusaders, Persians and others to have found the stashes – always assuming that Roman soldiers didn’t just torture the priests to find the locations and grab them in AD 70.

  Since most of the caches in the list are described as having been hidden within constructed settlements, it’s hard to imagine that they all remained undiscovered under those circumstances. On the other hand, the fact that two items – albeit not actually treasure – have been found makes it equally easy to imagine that there is more stuff still out there. It’s always worth looking anyway, as the area has been a busy one throughout history, so there are treasures from many periods around – just at the beginning of 2015, 20lb of gold coins were found in a dried up harbour at Caesarea, though these are from around the 10th century AD and so unrelated to the Scroll.

  The most likely locations, therefore, would be the more remote ones in caves and hills, rather than in settlements. The problem being that the names and geography have changed over time. Nevertheless, it all seems to centre on the north and east of the Dead Sea – and if someone could definitively identify the Scroll’s choice of Kohlit, that would probably be the most useful option.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  The biggest problem with getting anywhere near any of the known locations is that they’re all in territory frequently fought over by both standing armies and terrorists, and the first entry –Achor – is in a live-firing range for Israeli artillery and tanks. Which is inconvenient to say the least.

  Aside from such physical hazards, the region is also a bureaucratic minefield for archaeologists and treasure-hunters, with bits of sites being administrated by different authorities, which makes getting all the right permissions more of a slog. Because the region is home to sites sacred to three major religions, permission is denied to excavate at certain places – the Temple Mount is an obvious one. That said, archaeologists have found that it is possible to get permissions to search the spoil heaps produced by necessary building and maintenance work around this part of Jerusalem.

 
; Of course, the fact that it is a centre point for three huge religions means that there are also constant expeditions from companies, religious organizations and universities around the world, all competing for the same permissions and licences to dig – and that will be your biggest obstacle.

  Although there’s obviously a lot of unrest, terrorism and organized crime in the region, ‘normal’ crime and street-crime are actually pretty rare in comparison to other firstworld countries.

  Israel has no remaining large mammalian predators, though there are endangered numbers of lynxes, Arabian leopards and sand cats still remaining, as well as the hyena.

  There are several venomous snakes in the area – including rattlesnakes – which love to hide in caves and shaded holes during the day, exactly where you’d be digging. The most dangerous is the Palestine viper, a yellowish 4ft snake with a zigzag camouflage pattern, common throughout the Middle East. There are also the Israeli mole viper, a black 3-footer, and the common viper, known locally as a black adder.

  You should also watch out for the deathstalker and southern mankiller (the clue’s in the name) scorpions, as well as the black widow and Mediterranean recluse spiders.

  All of these venomous creatures tend to be well camouflaged for a desert environment, and so stout boots and thick trousers are advised. Don’t even think of wandering any of these sites in flip-flops.

  Health-wise, rabies-shots are advised, as it is present in Israel, along with a high population density of stray dogs. Leishmaniasis is also endemic to the region, carried by sandflies – this is usually relatively harmless, but painful and inconvenient, and it can cause life-threatening fever in rare cases. If you’re visiting the Jordanian side of the border, be aware that the respiratory illness MERS has been reported there, though it hasn’t made it to Israel yet.

  Thankfully, medical care in both Israel and Jordan is among the best in the world (except in the Palestinian Territories), so if you do come a cropper you should be very well looked after.

  DRAGONS AND TREASURE

  In all this talk of lost treasures waiting to be found by adventurous searchers, we mustn’t overlook the hoards of those most famous treasure collectors: the dragons. The image of the magnificent dragon slumbering atop a surprisingly comfortable pile of jewels and gold coins is something of a familiar cliché – but it is both of those things for a reason. Clichés become clichés because they work.

  Obviously you won’t need to worry about encountering or having to engage in combat with any dragons during your treasure-hunting exploits; they’re well-known to have been extinct since at least the 14th century.

  The difficulty, then, would be in locating dragons’ hoards. However, you’d be wasting your time, as, by definition, the post-slaying part of every dragonslayer’s adventures involved a lot of accounting of the fortune amassed by the late reptile. This leaves us simply with the historical mystery of why dragons and treasure went so well together in the first place.

  All joking aside, the basic reason why Western culture has ended up associating dragons with treasure is psychological: a treasure to be won gives a number of dragonslayers a motive for taking the beast on in combat and, conversely, if there was to be a treasure that a story’s hero or heroes must win, then what more terrifying and dangerous guardian could stand in the way?

  It’s all the fault of the Greeks, of course.

  In Greek mythology, the legendary heroes such as the Argonauts often stumbled across treasure left by either the gods, titans, or previous kings. Unfortunately for these heroes, the treasures tended to be guarded by assorted monsters, which were called Drakon – the Greek word for guardian or ‘watcher’.

  In Scandinavia and the rest of Europe, the monsters who often had hoards of treasure waiting to be a reward for the men who slew them were called wyrms. Fafnir is one of the most famous examples, having been turned into a giant serpent by Loki as a punishment for having hoarded gold – which would then be stolen by Sigurd.

  In the Middle Ages, tales from different parts of the world were translated into various different languages, and somewhere in the mix the word Drakon got applied to these non-Greek guardians or watchers, and so it became commonly viewed that dragons loved nothing better than to sit on treasure hoards.

  In more modern times, from Tolkien’s villainous Smaug onwards, stories about dragons have given them a more prosaic reason for hoarding precious metals and stones: to encrust their vulnerable bellies with glittering armour.

  Today, however, there are no dragons, and the guardians of lost treasure are far more likely to be equally deadly drug gangs or terrorists.

  ALL AT SEA

  Although we tend to think nowadays – thanks to the movies, TV and videogames – of treasure hunters as roguish individuals, be they explorer, archaeologist, tomb robber, or enthusiastic amateur, most treasure hunting is actually done by licensed international companies. Furthermore, it tends to be done at sea.

  There are some good reasons for this. For one thing, there’s strength in numbers – not combat strength, but the physical ability to lift more stuff. All that gold is pretty damn heavy, after all. It also makes good use of technologies and engineering that had been developed through the two world wars, and brought something good out of them. Most practically of all, the simple fact is that the vast majority of lost treasure was lost at sea. The ocean floor around the world is littered with shipwrecks, and most of them carried something that was or is now of some value to somebody.

  Ships have been sinking for as long as shipping has existed, whether due to piracy, storms, warfare, icebergs, or shallow rocks coming out of nowhere. Most recoveries of historic treasure – especially historic bullion and ingots – is a product of the maritime salvage industry. Partly this is because of post-World War II equipment – sonar, diving gear and so on became available to maritime industry and archaeology. Ships full of mini submarines, however, do not come cheap, and cost thousands of dollars a day to run.

  Probably the most famous such organization is actually semifictional; Clive Cussler’s NUMA. It’s semi-fictional because Cussler also created it as a real-world non-profit archaeological organization, as well as having it be a fictional government department. The fictional NUMA has saved the world multiple times, while recovering some of the most famous historical treasures and artefacts, but the real NUMA hasn’t been too shabby either – it found and raised the Confederate submarine Hunley (one of the earliest submarines ever made), and was also instrumental in discovering the extant location of the legendary Mary Celeste after nearly 200 years.

  A more representative example of marine salvage would be Odyssey Marine Exploration, a US-owned and British-crewed deep-water salvage company who are the subject of the TV reality series, Treasure Quest. There are bigger companies who’ve made more spectacular finds, but the TV show will give you a good idea of how such firms operate, and the various bureaucratic hoops they have to jump through to get commissions, salvage contracts and permissions to explore wrecks – which may involve several countries all needing to give the right documentation.

  OTHER TYPES OF TREASURE

  Although most people think of treasure as being coins, jewels, bullion, precious metals, historically significant objects, or artworks, there are other kinds of valuables for which people search and which have different kinds of value.

  There are many types of film and TV prints which are now missing, either through loss or the decay of the actual celluloid. In some cases, film prints were deliberately destroyed for one reason or another. For example, the first ever LGBT-themed movie, Anders Als Die Andern (Different from the Others), starring Conrad Veidt, and made in 1919, was the victim of attempted erasure by the Nazis, and now only half of it remains. The other half would, therefore, be a treasure of sorts.

  Many TV shows around the world were originally destroyed because of lack of storage space, or because it was never expected that anyone would want to see them again, or because the contracts with th
e performers didn’t allow reuse or repeats. Now that the cultural and historical value of these archives have been recognized, individuals and companies are searching for them. Most famously, the search for such lost episodes of Doctor Who regularly makes the news in the UK.

  The biggest problem with searching for such archive film is the nature of the celluloid, which is both highly flammable and decomposes into a lump over time, especially if not stored under proper conditions. This isn’t just a problem with old and fragile film stock, or footage that is slated for deliberate erasure, however – the rise of digital non-physical media – cloud storage and so forth – has led to another type of loss.

  Films and other forms of artwork which exist only in digital form are vulnerable to magnetic damage and server outages – in 2014 digital works by Andy Warhol, and NASA footage from the moon, were recovered from degraded floppy disks just in the nick of time – and it’s known that other works have been lost in similar ways.

  Cryptids are another example of a priceless treasure sought by people, which could be of inestimable value to science. Cryptids are unknown animals, some more plausible than others, which have yet to be properly discovered.

  At the less-likely end of the scale, the person who brings in a live Bigfoot or Yeti, or a living dinosaur, would make their fortune – and, strange as it sounds, there are people who look for exactly these creatures, and not just on silly reality TV shows. Several scientific expeditions have been made to the Congo in search of what the locals call mokele-mbembe, which is reputed to be a type of sauropod dinosaur. (This overlooks the fact that the descendants of dinosaurs which didn’t go extinct are what we now call birds.)

  On the more believable end, it’s certainly possible that some animals believed to be extinct may still exist. The coelacanth was rediscovered in 1936 after having been thought extinct for 65 million years, after all. Today in Tasmania there are still sightings of the thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, which was declared extinct in 1936, and it’s currently thought, based on DNA evidence, that the legendary Yeti might actually be a species of bear thought to be extinct since the last ice age.