Huh. For decades I’ve had the idea that this was the same stone that is worshipped in Mecca today. Is it really not the same one? Are we certain?
I picked up that idea so very long ago that I have no idea where I read it. I am sure it was presented to me as a fact though.
I’ve never heard that.
According to Unca Cecil, there are still a few cases of Canadian Club whiskey from a 1970s promotion out there somewhere, waiting to be found. And if you don’t consider a free case of hooch to be treasure, I shall have to ask you to step outside!
The theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum factors into the plot of Daniel Silva’s latest book, The Collector, which I just finished. Vermeer’s The Concert was the stolen piece the book focused on, but they did also talk about the Rembrandt.
Hey, I don’t drink, but I’d call that an important historical artifact.
Thanks for the back-up, m’dear, the check is in the mail.
No reason to think so. Popular Astronomy published a history of the Black Stone of the Kaaba many years ago, and doesn’t mention any connection. In addition, the Black Stone doesn’t appear to be the same conical shape. Finally, I read an article in a Meteorite journal back in the 1970s in which a Muslim meteorist examined the Black Stone while on the hajj, and he said that the Black Stone was not meteoric.
By OG source, I choose to assume you meant, well, The Straight Dope? 
Which lead to a very, very long series of follow ups by CKDexterHaven about manna. I remember this, because it was literally one of the first threads HERE I commented on as I remembered details from the last column on the subject that had been lost to the changes of the internet.
Meteoriticist. The discipline is meteoritics.
The thread title reminds me of one of the purported investment opportunities a grifter promoted at the time of the 1720 South Sea Bubble, "an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
I’m pretty sure there are treasures buried somewhere on my acreage, but so far all I’ve dug up are century-old bricks.
Burnt to ashes in allied bombing. Some of the ceramics survived the flames. Maybe some bits and pieces were taken off and survived.
Yeah, Jesus had a final Passover feast, and drank from a cup. Maybe someone saved it, but there is no evidence, and no one really cared until the early medieval period.
Yep. Could be destroyed or in someones attic.
Or sunk.
In a sealed room under the Forts near Ft MacArthur were a lot of unclaimed footlockers from MIAS and KAIs.
The score of Mozart’s only cello concerto may still exist somewhere.
On a related note, there’s the rather ridiculous story of the only copy of Mendelssohn’s cello concerto falling off the coach that was carrying it to its dedicatee. That one is probably lost forever. Just imagine if it was as beautiful as his violin concerto…
Sorry – I meant to type that but it didn’t register.
The original H.R. Giger work that was used for the album cover of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery was stolen from an exhibit and never recovered.
Marc Blitzstein lost the manuscript to his “Airborne Symphony” and had to rewrite the entire piece from memory.
Sometimes they turn up in the most unexpected places.
In 1922 Hemingway lost a suitcase with everything he had written in Paris, including the carbon copies. I’ve always hoped it would turn up some day in a train station lost and found.
Yes, but as described on Wikipedia, the original manuscript was later recovered, so it doesn’t count for the purposes of this thread. Blitzstein preferred his second version, so this is what is now known as the Airborne Symphony.
That reminds me of this:
Assuming ANY of that ever really existed…