Ancient Treasures: The Discovery of Lost Hoards, Sunken Ships, Buried Vaults, and Other Long-Forgotten Artifacts

191 Pages·2013·2.67 MB·English

by  Brian Haughton

Ancient Treasures
ANCIENT TREASURES
The Discovery of Lost Hoards,
Sunken Ships, Buried Vaults, and
Other Long-Forgotten Artifacts
BRIAN HAUGHTON
Copyright © 2013 by Brian Haughton All rights reserved under the Pan-
American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written
permission from the publisher, The Career Press.
ANCIENT TREASURES
EDITED BY JODI BRANDON
TYPESET BY EILEEN MUNSON
Cover design by Joseph Sherman Printed in the U.S.A.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Library of Congress
has cataloged the print edition as follows: Haughton, Brian, 1964—
Ancient treasures : the discovery of lost hoards, sunken ships, buried vaults,
and other long-forgotten artifacts / by Brian Haughton.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60163249-4 -- ISBN 978-1-60163-548-8 (ebook) 1. Treasure
troves--Anecdotes 2. Antiquities--Anecdotes. 3. Coin hoards--Anecdotes. 4.
Hoards, Prehistoric--Anedotes. I. Title.
G525.H3226 2013
622’.19--dc23
2013012532
For Marion Haughton
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent Lisa Hagan, of Paraview, and my family for putting up with
me during the writing of this book.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Deir el-Bahri Mummy Cache
Chapter 2: The Discovery of Tutankhamun’s Treasure
Chapter 3: The Gold of Troy: Priam’s Treasure
Chapter 4: The Lydian Hoard (The Karun Treasure)
Chapter 5: The Treasure of Benghazi: Heist of the Century?
Chapter 6: The Morgantina Treasure and the Looting of Italy
Chapter 7: The Sevso Treasure
Chapter 8: Roman Treasures From England: The Hoxne Hoard and the
Mildenhall Treasure
Chapter 9: The Treasures of Pompeii
Chapter 10: Lost Treasures of Afghanistan
Chapter 11: The Staffordshire Hoard
Chapter 12: Viking Hoards
Chapter 13: The Quedlinburg Hoard
Chapter 14: The Search for the Ancient Chinese Treasure Ships
Chapter 15: The Spanish Treasure Fleet
Chapter 16: The Amber Room
Chapter 17: Fake Ancient Treasures
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
“Treasure” can take many forms. It might be an ancient chest brimming with
gold and silver objects, a romantic image of something almost mystical hidden
away and forgotten in bygone times, even a legal term defined by law to denote
certain types of artifacts dug up from the ground. The 1997 Treasure Act in the
UK, gives a number of different types of find that qualify as treasure, including:
Any metallic object, other than a coin, provided that at least 10 per cent by weight of metal is
precious metal (that is, gold or silver) and that it is at least 300 years old when found. If the object is
of prehistoric date it will be Treasure provided any part of it is precious metal.… All coins from the
same find provided they are at least 300 years old when found.… Only the following groups of coins
will normally be regarded as coming from the same find: hoards that have been deliberately
hidden…smaller groups of coins, such as the contents of purses, that may been dropped or lost…
1
votive or ritual deposits.
But is the human fascination with such treasure purely a desire for wealth, or
has it more to do with the romantic appeal of tales of lost ancient artifacts? It is
certainly true that the stories behind the loss and recovery of a number of ancient
treasures, like the Sevso Treasure and the Amber Room, for example, read like
edge-of-the-seat fiction, somewhere between Indiana Jones and James Bond. But
treasure need not always be in the form of gold and silver jewelry, weaponry or
coins, as the chapter on the incredible cache of mummies from Deir el-Bahri, on
the west bank of the Nile, opposite the city of Luxor, in Egypt, shows. The main
connection between the treasures discussed in this work is that each has a story.
From the riches of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, to the
northern European hoards of the Vikings, from ancient Chinese Treasure Ships
to Nazi lootings during WWII, every treasure has a fascinating tale to tell. Such
stories can shed much-needed light on the ancient cultures that originally
deposited the artifacts; or, if the objects were looted from their original context,
it may be the often-labyrinthine journeys of the treasures after their discovery in
modern times that provide us with the astonishing narrative. In this way the
ancient and the modern combine to create a unique picture of the objects that
goes beyond archaeology and history.
Two chapters in this book deal with a favorite theme of treasure hunting tales:
shipwrecks. The rich New World plunder of the Spanish treasure fleets of the
16th to 18th centuries has been the target of elaborate salvage attempts by
modern treasure hunters, mainly off the Florida coast, whereas the remains of
Admiral Zheng He’s huge Chinese treasure ships of the 15th century and their
cargoes have been far more difficult to track down. The world of fake ancient
artifacts is covered in another section of this work, which shows that as long as
there are people rich enough and greedy enough to be fooled by appearance,
often spectacularly so, as in the case of the Chiemsee Cauldron, then the trade in
fake antiquities will continue to flourish.
A recurring theme in Ancient Treasures is looted treasure, and the way it more
often than not finds its way to many of the world’s greatest museums, which
have knowingly accepted such illegally excavated treasure hoards. There is a
stark contrast between the European and North American leisure pursuit of
treasure hunting, and the activities of looters in poor countries, such as some
nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, which are rich in
archaeological remains. (See the chapters on the Lydian Hoard and the
Morgantina Treasure.) Looting is a way of life for some villagers in these areas,
though they often receive as little as 1 percent of the actual value of the objects
they recover, the rest going to middlemen and dealers. A country’s
archaeological sites and museums are always most at risk of looting during times
of war and political upheaval, and it has been estimated that between 3,000 and
7,000 objects are still missing from the Iraq Museum, which was looted in April
2003.
Archaeological looting, however, is not confined to poorer countries. In
Britain, archaeological sites are still under threat from illegal metal detecting,
mostly done at night by people rather romantically nicknamed “nighthawks.”
(“Thieves” would be a more apt description.) A 1988 congressional report on
vandalism and looting in the archaeologically rich Four Corners region of the
United States (where the boundaries of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and
Colorado meet) stated that up to 90 percent of known Native American
archaeological sites in the region had been vandalized. In an article in The
Arizona Republic (“Stolen Artifacts Shatter Ancient Culture,” November 12,
2006), Dennis Wagner reported that an estimated 80 percent of the ancient
archaeological sites in the United States have been plundered. The recent
phenomenon of e-trading in illicit antiquities has exacerbated the problem of
looting. As Karen Olsen Bruhns says in an online article, “The past is being
bulldozed out of the ground and being sold on-line.”2 Unfortunately, the fact is
that as long as the demand is there (which it certainly is: The illicit market is
measured in billions of dollars per year), the looting of archaeological sites and
the black market for antiquities will continue.
There is often a great deal of myth and folklore surrounding treasure; indeed,