What Are Some Artifacts, Artworks, Treasures, etc. That Are Probably Somewhere, But No One Knows Where?

I believe it all certainly could have existed. The Ark was a wooden box with some nice gilt foil work overlaid. Probably not as fancy as the one in ‘Raiders’, but hey, it was crafted by fugitive desert nomads using what they had. The Commandments were thought up and chiseled by Moses and / or Aaron. And the staff of Aaron-- well, it was a stick.

I also believe it very likely that Jesus was a real person who preached the Jewish faith in a radical way that was controversial enough to get himself crucified. And since he had the beginnings of a following at the time of his death (a Friends list of at least 12 11), I imagine that someone kept at least part of the wood from his cross. So many religious orders have claimed to have a piece of the ‘one true cross’ and of course at least 99.99% percent of those claims are bogus. But maybe there’s one little sliver still out there that’s real…? Who knows…

From Hell letter.

I made @TruePisces a copy of that- a long with a Jack the Ripper troll doll and a plush half a kidney.

From memory “I am down on hookehs, yes sirreebob I am.”

True story.

I would love to see a pic of that!

Not quite on the level of things in other posts: film of Abbie Hoffman getting booted off the stage by Pete Townshend at Woodstock. One of the cameramen on the crew swears he captured it, but where the footage ended up is a mystery.

I’d prefer to see the kidney…

There is no doubt there was a Man we call Jesus, so he had a cup. Big deal. . Old religions often had a holy icon- they still do, However, it is quite possible the Ark was looted and destroyed.

Yes there is.

A good book to read about this is Zealot by Reza Aslan. Examines what is and is not know of the historical figure of Jesus, discusses what is fact and fiction. From someone who was Mulsim, converted to Christian, then back to Muslim - so no specific axe to grind. A fairly interesting read. If you can find them, A Marginal Jew series by Meier goes in to far more depth in 5 volumes. Some interesting details. There obvously was a historical Jesus, but much of the detail of the Christian religion was fabricated by Paul. His preaching to non-Jews was tolerated, and when Jerusalem was wiped out during the Jewish revolt, his version came to dominate. Later edits and fabrications to ensure other record matched the dogma also happened. (For example, Josephus was very likely “updated” to conform to doctrine).

But the true cross was lost - buried? - until it was very conveniently discovered when dug up by a crew working for Emperor Constantine’s mother. For there, fragments of it have spread across Christendom, and like the loaves and fishes, multiplied enough to apparently build a fleet of ships, according to one sarcastic observer. Odds are crosses were reused over and over until the crossbar was no longer serviceable.

The Holy Grail probably went back with all the other dishes to be washed and mixed into the general dining crockery.

If there was a historical Jesus he obviously drank from many cups over the years, but for there to be one “holy grail” would require a historical meal where Jesus asked his friends to pretend that they are eating his meat and drinking his blood, which seems like a stretch.

Conflicting with this is the finding of Charles Rohault de Fleury, who, in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion of 1870 made a study of the relics in reference to the criticisms of Calvin and Erasmus. He drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross showing that, in spite of what various authors have claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres (9.8 or 13.1 feet) in height, with transverse branch of two metres (6.6 feet) wide, proportions not at all abnormal.

But I have doubts about the finding of the cross. It was likely reused, then used as firewood. Maybe the cup might have been saved, but there is no evidence of such.

In 1216, King John made a crossing of The Wash - the large tidal estuary between Lincolnshire and East Anglia in England. The journey did not go well and several carriages in the horse drawn train were swept away and lost, including the ones containing royal treasures and coronation regalia.
King John died supposedly from dysentery a few days later.
It’s possible that there was foul play and that he was poisoned and the treasure stolen and a cover story woven about it all being lost in the mud, or the story might be mostly true and somewhere, under the thick tidal sediments, or out in the North Sea, there lie the remains of the treasures (probably mostly just the precious metals and jewels at this point)
Lots of people have gone looking for the treasure, nobody has ever found anything, but it’s a huge area that is probably impossible to extensively search in its entirety.

Legends abound of Captain Kidd’s lost treasure, rumored to amount to $160 million in total. He certainly got around a lot in the day to day activities of privateering / pirating, and did leave a lot of treasure strewn about in his wake.

Kidd left actual buried treasure at Gardiners Island in the New York area. He had Mr. Gardiner bury it and told Gardiner he would kill him and his family if he didn’t give it all back upon Kidd’s return. A list of the treasure exists; it consisted of gold and silver worth millions in today’s money. But when Gardiner heard that Kidd was captured, he returned all the treasure to the British government. Or so the story goes. Did Gardiner return all of it? I imagine it would’ve been tempting to hang on to a gold bar or three.

In 2015 a team of divers off the coast of Madagascar found the wreck of the Adventure Galley, a ship that had belonged to Kidd, along with a 121 lb. bar of silver– Amazing find! But wait, turns out it was actually a 121 lb. chunk of lead ballast. Oh well.

And of course, there’s the Oak Island Mystery, which fascinated me as a kid. A pit on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia where some tantalizing small pieces of treasure have been excavated, rumored to be buried Captain Kidd treasure, among many other theories. But the pit has numerous ‘pitfalls’ that have resisted many efforts over the years to excavate it fully, continually flooding, and killing at least 6 people over the years.

Who knows what more of Captain Kidd’s treasure may still be out there, waiting to be discovered?

The occupants of the Holy Land seem to have had a talent for showing rich visitors exactly what they wanted to see - the assorted tombs of Jesus, the multiple fields where the angels announced the nativity (apparently Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox angels chose different fields), the 12-century building where the Last Supper happened, etc. They even showed pilgrims the inn where the Good Samaritan took the injured traveller - something that never actually happened. Any surprise they’d plant something to be “found” by the emperor’s mother as the True Cross? Add to that things like the Shroud of Turin, which seems to have originated in the 12th century and never went near the Holy Land.

Where there’s a market, someone will come up with a product.

Similarly, it’s not unlikely that some cave in Missouri or Oklahoma somewhere contains loot that Jesse James robbed.

Lewis’s “portable boat”, a failed experimental ironwork contraption hauled all the way from Philadelphia and eventually buried near the Great Falls of the Missouri in Montana during the Lewis and Clark expedition to the pacific ocean 1803-1806. A few researchers have looked for it using some sort of ground penetrating radar.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s probably somewhere, but there’s a lost play, Love’s Labour’s Won, that’s mentioned in a list of Shakespeare’s works written in 1598, that evidently also made it into print at some point (there’s a separate record of a printed play by that title), and that didn’t make it into the First Folio for reasons unknown. Some people theorize that it’s an alternative title for a known play (both The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing are plausible candidates), but it’s more likely to be a bona fide sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, which has an ending that leaves plenty of room for a sequel.

Anyway, it’s the Holy Grail of Shakespeare studies, and there’s a chance it could actually turn up someday.

I thought there was another lost comedy Robin Of Sherwood as well.

It fascinated me as a kid as well and I gobbled up everything I could find to read about it.

But as an adult, it became quite obvious that the whole thing is bunk and has been nothing but a vehicle for investment money from almost the beginning. Every account of the Oak Island 'money pit’s early history is disputed but a generally accepted version is that the story begins in 1795 when a teenage boy, Daniel McInnis, was exploring the island and discovered a tackle block hanging from the limb of an oak tree. Below the tackle block was a noticeable depression in the ground. This was enough to encourage young Daniel to dig, believing it was possible that pirates had chosen this spot for buried treasure…

McInnis and two friends started digging and found a layer of flat stones two feet down. At 10 feet down, the friends found a layer or platform of oak logs. They found two other such platforms at 20 and 30 feet down…

OK, hold up. A couple of teenage in 1795, with shovels, dug a hole 30 feet deep!? Right. They came back nine years later, when they got together with other investors and formed the Onslow Company, so they could come back to the Money Pit with manpower and machines.

“The group of treasure-seeking friends struck oak platforms every 10 feet until at last, at 90 feet, they found a flat stone with an encoded inscription they couldn’t read at the time.”

There is so much of this that doesn’t make sense. The pirates carried a chest of loot to the tree but needed a block to lower it? And look, when you cover something with dirt, it’s hidden. To think that pirates would have the need to bury their treasure 90 feet down - let alone have the machines to do it - is insanity. And why cover it with a mysterious stone? Isn’t the point of burying the treasure so that no one would find it? If you don’t expect anyone to find it, why cover it with an encrypted stone? And don’t me started on the flooding tunnels.

The whole thing is so outlandish I’m shocked they could find anyone to believe or invest in it.

I’ve long been skeptical of the Oak Island Treasure, too.

But it lead Preston and Childs (the guys who wrote The Relic and created Agent Pendergast) to write Riptide, a thriller in which the events ascribed to the Oak Island treasure, actually took place. A notorious pirate does bury treasure down in a hole equipped with all sorts of booby traps, themselves designed by a London architect of Christopher Wren-level skill. Like all of their works, it’s completely ludicrous (it would cost all the hidden treasure to pay for that magnificent underground structure), but weirdly addictive. And there’s a twist.