Exactly what I was thinking.
What is the definition of alive? Could I bring back dinosaur tissue samples? Eggs and sperm?
That was my thought too.
I believe the rule is “one item”.
I was originally thinking of man made things but if you want to blow your wad on sperm, knock yourself out.
The copy of Love’s Labour’s Won listed in a bookseller’s inventory in 1603. Worst-case scenario, it’s an alternate title for Much Ado About Nothing or some other play we already have, but at least we’ll know.
Venus di Milo’s arms?
First thing I thought of in reading the OP.
BTW: Welcome to the Dope.
or maybe the Honjō Masamune
Or the Peking Man skull
I think I’d like to be given the run of the Library of Alexandria and choose something from there. Not sure what (because we don’t know everything that is there)
Regards…Derek
Ewww . . . and I thought his bloody cross was out there! But his cross may contain other bodily fluids that may be of interest to science. Perhaps we can tell what his last meal consisted of if he shat himself at the end.
There, I tried to one up you, but can’t quite rise to the level of Jesus semen. That’s just sick. Kudos to you!
The recipe for Greek Fire.
Any Roman novel.
We only have two surviving Roman Novels, out of tens of thousands.
The rest were destroyed, in the Dark Ages.
At last we know the real reason the tomb was empty on the third day:
Time-traveling forensic pathologists stole the body!
Kandinsky’s Composition I before it was destroyed in a WWII air raid.
The Nixon tape shortly after its recorded and before the 18 1/2 minutes got erased. I was thinking maybe the translator’s notes of Trump’s meeting with Putin before Trump seized them, but its not clear whether they actually contained details of what was discussed.
The Antikythera mechanism.
I mean, I know people have more or less figured out what it was for, and what it might have looked like, more or less and there have been some amazing reconstructions, but I want to see the original, in its original condition (with all of the accessories we don’t know about, if there are any)
Dead 30 year old Hitler?
Something like two-thirds of J.S. Bach’s compositions were discarded or burned in the first few decades after he died, as I recall, so I’d want to go back and return with at least one of those.
Ooo, or the suitcase full of Hemingway’s early stories, lost forever by his wife in the Gare de Lyon train station in Dec. 1922. (Joe Haldeman wrote a great novel about the incident, The Hemingway Hoax).
The recipe for Roman concrete.
(Especially if I can make a stop along about 1850 to get the recipe into the right hands.)