Quest for Treasure

        During the last few years there has been an enormous increase in the number of treasure salvage expeditions. Huge quantities of lost treasure are being recovered. News reports of dramatic finds from all over the world have become commonplace. A stream of articles have appeared describing the recovery of multi-million dollar fortunes from sunken ships and secret treasure-laden chambers. Sometimes the discoveries are made right under our noses.

        Advances in modern technology lie behind the recent boom in treasure hunting. The availability of high-resolution satellite images, the development of ground-penetrating radar, portable seismic and sonar detectors, computer image enhancement and low-cost proton magnetometers have revolutionised the age-old quest for treasure. These days, anyone can produce a detailed map of magnetic anomalies and subterranean caverns quickly and cheaply.

        It is now possible to detect and recover sunken treasures from depths unimaginable even a few years ago. Unmanned robots steered by remote video link can dive several miles beneath the ocean waves. Side-scanning sonar can probe the deepest marine trenches and identify the remains of long-lost vessels waiting to be salvaged.

        The cost of mounting an expedition is comparatively low, especially when using remote operated vehicles. The rewards of success can stagger the imagination. A typical treasure wreck can yield anything from a few million to several hundred million dollars. Land based treasure hoards can exceed that by an order of magnitude. Salvage expeditions financed by private consortia are springing up all over the world as people rush to join the great treasure bonanza.

        Many great treasures were plundered and transported all over the ancient world by conquering armies. Bloodthirsty Mongol nomads under the command of Gengis Khan (1162-1222 AD) swarmed across the Steppes stripping every ounce of bullion from the coffers of cities from China in the east to Poland and Hungary in the west and as far south as the Middle East. Gengis Khan's treasure has disappeared from the annals of history. It was reputedly buried in his vast underground tomb in the trackless wilderness of Outer Mongolia. The burial party of 5,000 was said to have been slaughtered by an inner circle of faithful soldiers who themselves were executed and so on until not a single witness remained to reveal the tomb's location.

        Ceaseless wars throughout history served to concentrate regional wealth into larger and larger hoards, until it represented the accumulated wealth of countless empires and kingdoms engaged in centuries of trade. Security soon became an important issue. Many ancient treasures were stored in secret vaults whose location was known only to a few high priests or royal aides.

        Sometimes the earth reclaimed her precious fruits when floods, famines, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and storms sent her treasures back to the depths of her womb.

        Some of the world's lost treasures lie in fairly shallow waters, often within sight of land, lightly covered in sand and silt. The owners have long departed this world, many perished in the very storms that sent their precious belongings to the bottom of the sea. Time and tide have obliterated their memory from history.

        Some treasure lies far out at sea, in the deep, dark waters beyond the continental shelf. Those wrecks usually lie on the bottom with hardly a trace of overlying silt or sediment. The cold, still ocean depths protect them from decomposition and dispersal. They are the mother lodes of many sunken treasure quests. The ships, blown off-course by raging storms and swirling seas, drifted far from the ancient trading routes before disappearing into the depths without leaving a soul to tell the tale.

        Many treasure wrecks have lain beneath the waves for centuries waiting to be salvaged, their precious cargoes worth thousands of times more today than when they were lost.

        Some treasures lie buried beneath the earth in caves, tunnels and secret chambers under shrines, tombs, holy mountains and other sacred places. Tribes, peoples and entire civilisations, who have long since vanished from the face of the earth, concealed them in places whose locations are now blurred by the mists of time.

        Amongst the most famous of such lost treasures are those of King Solomon, the Second Temple of Jerusalem, the Cathars, the Knights Templar and the Incas of South America. All are religious treasures comprising vast quantities of gold and silver. Curiously, those who accumulated the treasures shared common religious beliefs and practices and many of them perished through religious persecution.

        The most striking link between them is Christianity. The Judaeo-Christian Scriptures contain many cryptic references to "treasure". It was Christian Conquistadors who destroyed the Inca civilisation in their quest for the City of Gold, the fabled Eldorado. Many of the Conquistadors were remnants of the Knights Templar, whose full title was The Order of Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonis). The Order was destroyed by the religious persecution of Phillip IV and Pope Clement V in 1307 AD. Adherents to the "gnostic" heresy of the Cathars had met with a similar fate in the previous century.

        In the aftermath of the First Crusade of 1096 AD, a small group of noblemen led by Hugues de Payens presented themselves before Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, proposing to form a monastic order of knights, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in the service of the Holy Land. They were granted quarters in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which was built on the site of the second Temple of Solomon, destroyed by the Romans in 68 AD.

        The early history of the Knights Templar is shrouded in mystery. It appears that the original founders undertook their mission after one of them had been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and returned with an ancient scroll. Once they had established themselves at Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which is also known as Mount Zion, they began secret excavations. Not long after that, they became enormously rich and powerful.

        The fabulous wealth of this secretive Order was almost certainly acquired after the discovery of a treasure scroll hidden beneath the floor of the Temple ruins. Subsequent excavations in and around Jerusalem unearthed as much as 138¹ tons of gold and silver. The Knights quickly became the most powerful military organisation in the medieval world. The original treasure was increased many times over during the course of their 200-year tenure by international trade, intrigue, banking, spoils of war and ransom payments for the many kings and princes they had captured during their military campaigns.

        Recent research indicates that the Knights Templar had discovered the Americas about 150 years before the voyage of Columbus. Secret trading with the New World, mainly for gold and silver, could have accounted for much of their great wealth.

        The Knights' monastic Order was answerable only to the Pope. In all other respects it was completely independent and autonomous. The Catholic Church eventually disbanded the Order and excommunicated its members as heretics.

        A few outposts of the Order in Spain and Portugal survived the Pope's persecution. Christopher Columbus may have been a member of the Portuguese Order of Christ. Persistent rumours that he had a map of the New World before setting off on his first voyage across the Atlantic now seem plausible.

        The Knights Templar had a large fleet based at La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast of France. Just before the mass arrest of the Order's members on Friday 13th, October 1307, a group of 24 Knights set sail in 18 galleys. They were not seen or heard from again. The rest of the Order was captured and subjected to horrific tortures. Many were burnt at the stake. But, despite this, none of their fabulous treasure was ever recovered.

        The Order's battle flag, the skull and crossbones motif, popularly known as the Jolly Roger, soon became the symbol of pirates and privateers throughout the world, around whom stories of buried treasure abound. The whereabouts of the Knights and their treasure has vexed the imagination of many generations since that fateful Friday the thirteenth.

        We can only speculate about the first Templar scroll, however, there are other cases of scrolls being unearthed in the Holy Land. Eusebius, the Church historian, reports that a version of Psalms, "was found at Jericho in a jar," by Origen, the early Church Father, sometime between 211 and 217 AD².

        We also know from writers such as Al Qirqisãnî, Al Bîrûnî and Shahrastãnî that similar finds were made in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. Those scrolls were said to have belonged to a religious group called the Maghãrîya, or Cave Sect, named from the location of their writings. The finds led to the establishment of a Jewish Karaite community in Egypt, which was condemned as heretical by Orthodox Judaism. Their doctrine bore remarkable similarities to writings recently found near the Dead Sea.

        In 1947, a TaŽamireh Bedouin goatherd discovered a cache of scrolls in a cave on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. The finds eventually came to the attention of scholars and many more scrolls were found in nearby caves. Some of the scrolls had been stored in jars and were almost complete, but most had survived only as tiny fragments of brittle parchment that had to be pieced together with painstaking care.

        Scholars soon realised that the Scrolls had been hidden a few years after the Crucifixion and bore remarkable similarities to the New Testament Gospels. They were a missing link between Judaism and Christianity and the oldest Scriptures ever found, much older than papyrus fragments discovered in Egypt, at Nag Hamadi in 1945 and Oxyrhynchus in 1897 and 1903.

        In March 1952, amongst new finds in the area was a document indented on sheets of copper that had been riveted together and rolled up like a scroll. The pure metal had almost completely oxidised and split into two pieces along a join. It proved impossible to open the two halves of what became known as the Copper Scroll. Eventually, between the summer of 1955 and the spring of 1956, it was cut into strips at Manchester College of Technology under the supervision of a leading member of the International Scroll Team, John Allegro, who published the first translation³.

        The Copper Scroll is an inventory of buried treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem. The last item, number 61, reads, "In the Pit (Shîth) adjoining on the north, in a hole opening northwards, and buried at its mouth: a copy of this document, with an explanation and their measurements, and an inventory of each thing, and oth[er things]"⁴. The "pit" was situated beneath the great Altar of the Temple, described in detail within the Mishnah and by Josephus.

        The fortuitous discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has enabled researchers to begin piecing together the possible fate of the Templar treasures. It soon became apparent that the key to the mystery lay in understanding the significance of the references to treasure in the Holy Scriptures and the Knights Templar's apocalyptic interpretation of Christianity.

        This research has thrown new light on the origins of Christianity itself, an extremely controversial subject. The guardians of the Orthodox Christian and Jewish faiths have succeeded in keeping many of the Dead Sea Scrolls out of the public domain for nearly fifty years. It was only in the early nineties that controversial material from the Dead Sea caves was published outside the narrow confines of theological scholarship. Even so, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls will not be published until the second or third year of the next century, and some have mysteriously vanished.

        There seems little doubt now that the Knights Templar had modelled their Order on a Jewish monastic sect called the Essenes, previously known through the writings of ancient authors such as Josephus, Philo and Pliny the Elder. Modern scholars have identified their monastic settlement as that of Khirbet ("ruins of") Qumran. The ruins stand on a cliff-edged plateau overlooking the Dead Sea some 20 miles east of Jerusalem at Wadi Qumran, directly to the south of Jericho.

        The Dead Sea lies 1,300 feet below sea level. The river Jordan flows into the bitter salt lake at the bottom of a rift valley, the deepest on earth, plunging steeply through a rocky desert known as the wilderness of Judaea. The basin is bounded by a series of descending cliffs and plateaux scored by narrow gorges and gullies.

        The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves close to the ruins of Qumran, some barely a stone's throw from the site.

        The Jewish warrior-priests or monks who feature in the Scrolls called themselves the Sons of Zadok, after Zadok, the high priest who had anointed King Solomon, and from whom they claimed descent. They also referred to themselves as the Sons of Justice⁵. The monastery or fortress at Qumran was built on an eighth or seventh century BC ruin, now identified as Secacah, the Biblical City of Salt.

        In addition to several caches of sacred treasures and scrolls within the confines of Mount Zion, the Copper Scroll identified five other sites where treasures were buried. One of those was Secacah, on the Vale of Achor, the site of Khirbet Qumran.

        A recent excavation beneath the plaster floor of the ruins at Qumran has revealed a hoard of gold coins: 558 Tyrian tetradrachmae, weighing about 20 lbs⁶. The hoard was not listed in the Copper Scroll's inventory.

        In the last few years, the pieces of this epic jigsaw puzzle have begun to fall into place. The puzzle ranges across a huge swathe of geography and encompasses a 3,500-year period of human history. Almost every major religion and many minor ones are represented, including Jewish and Christian mystical and Gnostic sects that have been declared heretical. We also find traces of what were once thought of as myths and legends, such as the Templars' mysterious quests for the Holy Grail (Graal) and the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark disappeared from the Temple of Solomon during King Manasseh's reign (687-642 BC).

        The strange coincidences and synchronicities surrounding the Biblical treasures do not appear to have been noticed by the early theological scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were more concerned with minimising the impact of the Scrolls on Orthodox Christian and Jewish doctrine and gave little thought to solving one of history's most enduring mysteries. Their concerns lay in reburying the Scrolls under literally thousands of tangential theories and re-interpretations that have created a quagmire of confusion for those searching for the truth.

        But the truth always prevails. The quest for history's greatest hoard of lost treasure has been resurrected by the bright dawn glow of a new millennium.

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