God's Gold Read Online Free

of hyperbole of which Josephus is so often guilty? Did the holy treasures of Herod’s Temple find a home in the Eternal City? If so, were they eventually melted down for liquid capital? If not, what was their fate during the fifth-century Gothic and Vandal invasions? Could they even still survive today?
    The very idea was exhilarating. If true, the implications for humanity were enormous. Not only would this treasure be worth a king’s ransom of hundreds of millions of dollars, but as the symbolic insignia of a people lost and found—Judaism and the modern state of Israel—the political implications were highly sensitive, even dangerous.
    The following day the skies cleared and the sea ceased to swirl. We dived eagerly and found that ten-foot-deep sand blankets covering the seabed had been blasted away by the force of a thousand sea horses in a single storm, exposing parts of Dor’s ancient harbor floor never before seen by the human eye.
    Throughout those heady spring and summer days we found twelve shipwrecks along a 260-foot-long stretch of seabed—the richest concentration in the eastern Mediterranean—recovering a fifth-century BC Greek war helmet, Roman bronze bowls, and, gratifyingly, the noble timbers of those elusive Late Roman wooden hulls. I got my hands on more ancient pottery than I could ever have wished for. To my corporate friends this may have looked like old garbage, but to me it was living history, a vast jigsaw puzzle that had important historical stories to tell. In those days I wouldn’t have swapped my museum of brokenpots for a case of champagne. As I lived through the most invigorating time of my life, recording the archaeology, participating in television documentaries, and writing articles, the riddle of Titus, Josephus, and the case of the missing Jewish treasure was relegated to a back drawer of my mind for ten long years—stored away germinating, but never erased from memory.

3
GHOSTS OF ISRAEL PAST
    Strange how past memories resurface when you least expect. By 2001 I had swapped my face mask and wet suit for reading glasses and a smart suit to edit Minerva , the International Review of Ancient Art and Archaeology. Fighting crowds to work in London’s West End was a very long way from those heady days of shipwreck exploration in Israel.
    Each morning I would ritually savor my first cup of life-sustaining coffee while scanning the latest newspaper clippings for ancient ruins making the news. As a familiar time traveler into antiquity, most of the stories that found their way into the papers were old news to me; hot discoveries were rare. However, I was always alert for an exception to the rule that might give us a scoop over the magazine competition.
    One memorable day in August 2001 I spluttered on my coffee, and my eyes nearly popped out of my head as I read a story publicizing the opening of the Blood and Sand in the Colosseum exhibition in Rome. The Amphitheatrum Flavium, as it was originally called, was one of the engineering wonders of classical antiquity, a four-story entertainment facility started by the emperor Vespasian in AD 72 and finished by his son, the emperor Titus, in AD 80. When complete, the Colosseum boasted eighty entrances, was 620 feet long, 158 feet high, seated fifty thousand people, and was by far the largest amphitheater of the Roman Empire. The noise and atmosphere generated by this stone theater of death must have been terrifying, unlike any of today’s comparativelytame entertainment facilities, even Madison Square Garden on a world championship boxing night.
    To the side of the Colosseum’s main entrance is a massive marble lintel that once spanned a major passageway. Until very recently it lay idly on the ground, neglected by the 3 million visitors passing by each year. Ancient relics like these simply litter Rome. However, this turned out to be no ordinary stone. Since 1813 historians have been familiar with a Latin