Original subtitles

Mysteries can be buried anywhere,

under the earth,

beneath the sea,

or even right under our own feet.

And when we stumble upon them,

sometimes what we find can change history.

Tonight,

Divine Discoveries,

from a sacred fortress in the heart of Rome.

The whole place is buttressed like a defensive stronghold.

They have uncovered one

of the most important religious

institutions in the entire world.

To a stone tablet with a sacred message.

He does his best to read the writing

and what he's got

astonishes him.

To the oldest temple in the world.

It's so ancient

that it predates the construction of Stonehenge

and the Pyramids at Giza.

And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years

only to be discovered by chance

makes that even more extraordinary.

Join us now, because nothing stays hidden forever.

Sometimes just doing your job

results in astonishing finds,

especially when that job is construction

in an area rich in biblical history.

It's 1913,

and construction of the Palestine-Egypt railway

is moving full steam ahead along the coast

of what is now the modern state of Israel.

But as these railroad workers

are clearing out space to lay track,

they strike a large stone that seems out of place.

In this sandy earth, they find a flat piece of marble

about two feet tall and two feet wide.

As a few workers start to excavate it from the ground,

they notice that there is very faint writing on it.

It's been etched into the marble

and it's in a language that they can't understand.

intrigued by the find, one worker decides

to take the large marble slab home with him.

When he gets it to his house,

he puts it in his courtyard and uses it as a stepping stone.

The inscription is placed face up,

and it stays that way for 30 years.

Then, in 1943, he puts the stone up for sale,

and it attracts the attention of archaeologist Jacob Kaplan.

Kaplan heads to the house,

and when he takes a look at the inscription,

he immediately recognizes the writing.

It's Paleo-Hebrew, which is a style of writing

that was used from 1000 BC up until about 135 AD.

So right off the bat,

Kaplan knows that this thing is really, really old.

And although he can identify the script,

he can't actually understand it.

Nevertheless he goes ahead and he buys the slab

and he takes it home

and enlists some of his colleagues

to help him to decipher it.

As they start to translate,

the first line grabs their attention.

It reads, "I will call you to remember for goodness forever,

God spoke all these words."

Then, further down the stone, they identify other words.

"You shall not murder."

"You shall not commit adultery."

"You shall not steal."

Kaplan has found a fully intact stone

of the Ten Commandments,

that dates back to the era of the Old Testament.

In the Bible,

the Ten Commandments were famously given to Moses by God

at the top of Mount Sinai.

But those tablets are smashed by Moses

when he sees the Israelites worshiping the golden calf.

God later dictated the commandments back to Moses

who inscribed them onto a second set of tablets

in the 13th Century BC.

And then according to the Bible,

those tablets are stored in the Ark of the Covenant,

but then later on, the Ark and those tablets go missing.

For a moment, it seems the mystery

of the missing tablets may finally be solved.

but as researchers study the stone more closely,

they realize something doesn't add up.

Only nine of the 10 commandments from the Bible

are present on this stone.

The third commandment is missing.

The replacement commandment is an order to build a temple

on Mount Gerizim, which is a sacred site for Samaritans.

Further research discovers that a Samaritan synagogue

was built in the place where this stone tablet was found.

That temple was constructed

between 300 and 800 AD.

So the stone, while old,

was likely created hundreds of years after Moses's time.

Dr. Kaplan holds onto this stone for the next 50 years,

until finally his wife sells it after his death in 1995.

Over the following decades,

it changes hands a few times without much fanfare.

Then in December of 2024, the stone goes up for auction.

The stone's age, its distinct third commandment,

and the unusual story of its chance discovery,

ignite interest in the sale.

Bidding starts out high,

and then the price just keeps going up and up and up,

'til finally, when the final gavel falls,

the selling price is $5 million dollars.

The marble tablet goes to an anonymous buyer

who pledges to donate it to an Israeli institution.

In the end, this humble relic

will be preserved and admired for generations.

Next, a different kind of sacred discovery,

one frozen in time high up in the Andes.

On September 18th, 1995,

a mountain climber named Johan Reinhard and his guide

are climbing Ampato mountain in Southern Peru.

They are hoping to get a photo of an active volcano nearby,

but as they get close to the volcano,

the sky fills with smoke and ash,

begins to rain down on them.

The ash fall is melting the snow under their feet,

exposing rock that has been covered

by ice caps for centuries.

And as they near the peak,

there's something bright and red on the ground

catching Johan's attention.

As he gets closer, he sees that the red

is in fact red feathers sticking out from some rocks.

And when he looks, he sees that the feathers

seem to be part of a hat.

Johan moves away some of the stones, and he is astonished.

Looking up at him from the rocks

is the face of a young girl,

no more than 12 or 13 years old.

The body looks very well preserved,

she's wrapped in beautiful colorful textiles,

and she's surrounded by gold and silver figurines

and pottery vessels.

It's a breathtaking discovery,

but one that's also incredibly fragile.

Johan's worried that the heat from the active volcano

will soon destroy this naturally-preserved mummy.

He carefully picks up the girl's body,

and begins with his guide

the dangerous descent down the mountain.

It is a perilous journey, a treacherous 45-degree descent.

It takes two full days.

And then when he and the guide are down at the bottom,

it takes another 13 hours to walk to the nearest village.

Safely recovered,

the mummy becomes known as "Juanita"

and is an international sensation,

hailed as one of the greatest discoveries of the century.

But when researchers begin to study her more closely,

they uncover something surprising.

Juanita is sent to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore

where she's scanned, and researchers determine

that she was likely killed between the ages of 11 and 15.

Cause of death?

Blunt force trauma to the head.

But the evidence suggests that this was no accident,

that Juanita was intentionally killed.

Her death may have been brutal,

but the treasures buried with her

point to something far more sacred than murder.

Several of the items Johan finds with her remains

are fashioned of precious metals.

It's not likely these

would have been left accidentally behind

by a murderer.

It's much more likely

that they were intentionally left behind

as a sacrificial offering.

The figures and ceramics feature Incan designs,

which suggest that Juanita had been sacrificed to the gods.

Child sacrifice is of course abhorrent,

but at the time it was a sacred duty,

and this places her death to sometime in the Incan empire,

between 1400 and 1450.

Juanita's sacrifice wasn't just ceremonial,

it may have been a plea to calm a furious natural force.

Historians believe

that the nearby Misti and Sabancaya volcanoes

were really at the point of erupting,

and that Juanita may have been sacrificed

in order to placate the gods

and maybe make that eruption less catastrophic.

There is something almost poetic if you think about it,

that Juanita may have been sacrificed to stop the eruption,

only to be discovered as the ash melted away

and revealed her grave.

Let's say you're a regular guy

with a passion for scuba diving.

You love looking at coral reefs and tropical fish.

Then, one day, you accidentally spot something surprising

under the waves.

It's 1998 in Guatemala.

A local businessman named Roberto Samayoa

is out enjoying one of his favorite pastimes,

scuba diving in Lake Atitlan.

This is a picturesque lake flanked by volcanoes,

and mountain peaks and charming villages.

Around 50 feet below the surface, in very murky waters,

Samayoa sees something out of place.

He sees a shape start to emerge.

Getting closer, he discovers it's a large stone structure.

As he continues to explore,

he finds a series of staircases, temples, plazas.

This is not just one structure.

In essence, it looks like some kind of underwater city.

Samayoa reports his findings

to local archaeologists, but no one believes him.

Frustrated, he leaves the site untouched until 2007.

Samayoa decides to take matters into his own hands.

He dives upon his find once more, but this time,

he comes equipped with an underwater digital camera.

He snaps a few photos,

and now, everyone is beginning to believe him.

Researchers spend the next five years using sonar

to map out this underwater metropolis.

What they uncover is more than ruins,

it's the remains of a 2,500-year-old Mayan city.

Once thought to be just a legend, they name it Samabaj,

a blend of Samayoa's name and the Mayan word for stone.

As researchers explore further,

it's the religious elements

that unlock the mystery of Samabaj.

Within the ruins,

they find 16 different religious structures, and two saunas,

which the Maya would use to cleanse themselves

before religious ceremonies.

And then there's a large central square

with a stone altar and a sacred pillar at one end.

When the Maya were thriving in this area,

around 350 BC to 250 AD,

this city sat on an island in the middle of this lake.

For centuries, Samabaj stood

as a sacred sanctuary.

so how did this entire ancient city wind up underwater?

One of the volcanoes along the shore

of Lake Atitlan erupted.

Lava flowed down toward the lake

and plugged up a drainage channel

that carried overflow down the mountain.

It's kind of like when you plug up your bathtub

while the water's running,

the water just continues to rise and rise and rise.

By the time the water stopped rising,

Samabaj was deep under the lake,

and stayed out of sight for 1,700 years,

until Samayoa found it.

Ironically, the same water that drowned Samabaj

helped preserve it.

Because of the island's location

deep down in murky waters,

the site has not fallen victim to things like looting,

which has caused desecration

of other historical sites all throughout Central America.

So thanks to that volcanic eruption,

combined with Samayoa's discovery,

Samabaj is probably the most well-preserved site

of Mayan culture to this day.

From an ancient city lost below the waves,

to an even older site buried under the earth,

our next story takes us to a hilltop in Turkey.

Back in 1986, in Southeastern Turkey,

a farmer is plowing his property

along the foothills of the Taurus Mountains.

He reaches this area which is called Belly Hill,

a mound of land that stands about 50 feet higher

than the surrounding plateaus.

This area is filled with large stones

that all poke up through the earth,

threatening to break his equipment.

The farmer's been trying to remove some of these stones,

most of them are too large to get out of the ground.

But on this day in particular,

one of these stones catches his attention.

He takes a closer look

and he clears away some of the surrounding dirt.

It's a limestone statue of a human figure,

with finely carved eyes, nose and mouth.

Below that there's not much of a body,

except for a large phallus.

The statue looks really old,

and so the farmer decides to take this to a museum

about 12 miles away.

The director of the museum

does not seem very interested in this find,

but when the farmer threatens to throw it away,

they do reach a compromise

and decide to place the statue in the museum garden.

The statue sits there until 1992,

when a visiting archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt sees it.

Dr. Schmidt has been doing excavation work nearby

and recognizes this as a neolithic figure,

at least several thousand years old.

He wants to know more,

so he travels to the farm where it was found.

When he sees the large mound of land

that rises up above the plateau,

he can tell that it's man-made,

and these large stones that keep getting in the farmer's way

are actually the tops of limestone structures.

Schmidt turns his attention to the mound

and begins to dig.

Not very long after these excavations begin,

archaeologists find massive limestone megaliths

that are so close to the surface

that some of them have actually been scraped

by the farmer's equipment.

Further down, they find 16-foot-tall stone pillars,

each weighing between seven and 10 tons.

Some of them are carved with detailed reliefs of animals

like lions, foxes, snakes and vultures.

There are also enormous megaliths arranged

in a circular pattern, over 90 feet in diameter.

Altogether the site leads archaeologists to believe

that they've uncovered some kind of giant temple.

The site is called Gobekli Tepe,

and carbon dating puts its construction

between 9500 and 9000 BC,

making it the oldest temple ever discovered in the world.

It's so ancient that it predates writing

and the invention of the wheel.

It was constructed 6,000 years before Stonehenge

or the Pyramids at Giza.

Its age is astonishing,

but what's even more surprising is how it was built.

Schmidt estimates it would have taken over 500 people

to build Gobekli.

But humans were believed

to be hunter-gatherers at this time,

and this site suggests

that there was much more intelligence,

cooperation and planning that went into this

than archaeologists could have possibly thought.

Gobekli Tepe was a truly epic feat

of design and construction for its time.

And the fact that it survived for over 11,000 years

only to be discovered by chance, by a farmer,

makes that history even more extraordinary.

When we think of papal palaces,

we usually think of the Vatican.

But the popes actually had an earlier home,

one lost to time until very recently.

It's the summer of 2024.

And the city of Rome in Italy is gearing up

for Jubilee 2025.

It's a massive Catholic celebration,

and it's expected to draw roughly 30 million pilgrims

to the city.

To prepare for the influx of tourists,

the city undergoes a lot of upgrades.

One major project is renovating

and repaving the public square

in front of Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano,

the oldest public Catholic church in Rome,

which was founded in 324.

The plan is to add new landscaping,

lighting, even a fountain.

But not long after shovels hit the ground,

workers strike something that appears to be an ancient wall,

then another, then another.

It seems they've stumbled on some kind of structure.

They call in a team of archaeologists,

largely led by Daniela Porro.

She's the special superintendent of archeology in Rome.

She analyzes these walls and sees

that they're made of tuff,

basically an amalgam of stone from volcanic ash,

buttressed by wood.

She's able to realize through her analysis

that these walls date back to the ninth century,

which means they have found something incredibly special.

These are the fortification walls

that protected the original palace of the pope.

Before the Pope and the Catholic church

were based in nearby Vatican City,

the head of the church resided

in an elaborate papal palace in the heart of Rome.

It was built around 312 AD,

during the reign of the emperor Constantine the Great.

The palace would undergo several expansions and upgrades

over the next 500 years as the church grew in power.

As the Church expanded, the papal palace became a target

for Arab Anti-Catholic invaders

and even Roman aristocratic infighting

right at its doorstep.

In fact, the violence and the conflict got so bad

that in 1309, the papacy left the basilica,

and actually relocated the seat of the pope

to Avignon, France.

Abandoned and empty,

the palace falls into neglect,

and ultimately is decimated by fire.

In 1377, the papacy finally made its way back to Italy,

this time to Vatican City.

A few hundred years later,

Pope Sixtus V decided to tear down most of what remained

of the original palace complex.

When construction crews

rediscover the palace ruins 500 years later,

archaeologists turn their attention

to preserving the site.

Antiquity experts and archaeologists

feel it may take years to fully

grasp the enormity of what is in this structure.

What they do know is that they have uncovered

an incredibly well-preserved time capsule

of one of the most important religious institutions

and religious titles in the entire world.

Next, a casual walk in the woods

leads to finding another piece of papal history,

one that dates back hundreds of years.

It's January 2024.

Jacek Ukowski is walking along railroad tracks

in northwest Poland near the German border.

This area was used as a Nazi escape route

at the end of World War II,

so people sometimes find remnants of the past here,

helmets, firearms or other military artifacts.

As he's walking, his eye catches something half-buried

under the base of a tree.

He realizes it's a wedge-shaped object,

it's made of metal, but upon closer inspection,

he sees this is not a Nazi war relic,

in fact he doesn't even think it's from the modern era.

It's nothing like he's ever seen before.

Ukowski brings his discovery to a local museum,

hoping their experts can shed some light on this find.

There, archaeologist Grzegorz Kurka identifies

that the object is made of lead.

He examines it, and on one side, he sees letters

and some Roman numerals which captures his attention.

Kurka has seen an artifact like this before,

it's a lead papal bull seal,

or bulla used to authenticate papal decrees.

Kurka is now all in, and he wants to find out

which pope this actually belonged to.

Every pope's bulla

has on one side an image of Saints Peter and Paul.

But the other side is always unique, it has the Pope's name.

Unfortunately, this seal is cracked,

but he's able to decipher certain things

that give him clues as to which pope this might be from.

He's able to see the letters E and U-S.

And based on these clues, he's able to deduce

that this was the papal bull seal

of one of four possible popes,

Benedict XI, Clement V, Benedict XII, or Clement VI,

all of which will date the seal between 1303 and 1352.

Unfortunately, the document the seal

was attached to

decayed long ago, so we may never know exactly

which Pope this bull belonged to.

In any case, the seal survived in that spot for centuries,

but the mystery will likely survive for many, many more.

Imagine finding an unusual stone in a pile of rubble,

and learning it's covered in writing

dating back thousands of years.

What happens next is an adventure story

straight out of the movies.

In 1868, a French missionary is traveling

in what is now modern day Jordan,

delivering aid and spreading Christianity in the region.

His work takes him to a small abandoned area

near the village of Dibon, where something catches his eye.

In a pile of rubble, in ruins,

there's one stone that looks out of place.

It's about four feet tall,

it's black, and it's covered in strange characters.

He can't read the writing on it,

but he does his best to copy out some of the script

with a quick sketch.

Later, he returns to Jerusalem and shows it to a friend,

who thinks that the writing looks like Phoenician,

an ancient script that was the foundation

of the Greek and Hebrew alphabets.

Soon, news of the Phoenician stone

catches the ear of Charles Clermont-Ganneau,

a French translator and amateur archaeologist

based in Jerusalem.

Charles is intrigued,

and so he dispatches a friend called Ya'qub Karavaca,

to go make what's called a squeeze.

A squeeze is a paper impression

when the paper is wet,

pressed in the inscription and then pulled away,

sort of like when you rub a tombstone

to get the inscription off the front of it.

But before the impression can set,

rising tensions between nearby tribes take a dangerous turn.

Ya'qub and the stone are surrounded by

two Bedouin tribes.

And it seems that the locals have understood

that there is something significant about this monument,

and they're now fighting over it.

In the melee, the paper impression is torn up,

and then suddenly, Ya'qub gets stabbed in the leg.

Ya'qub narrowly escapes on horseback,

and brings the torn inscription fragments to Charles.

Slowly, one by one,

Charles begins to piece these pieces of paper together.

And what he's got in the end

is something that astonishes him.

It's 34 lines of text

written in first person by somebody called King Mesha.

According to the Bible,

back in the ninth century BC,

Mesha rebelled against the kingdom of Israel

and ruled Moab,

an ancient territory, located in modern-day Jordan.

The writing is mostly a recounting

of Mesha's military victories

and other history of the region.

But what really gets Charles excited

is that the text contains historical references to Israel,

the House of David, biblical events.

It even gives the Hebrew name for God.

These are some of the earliest references

to events in the Bible in the historical record.

Basically, this rock could be evidence

that the events of the Bible are based in real history.

They call it the Moabite Stone.

But as word spreads,

the locals fear the stone will be plundered by Westerners,

so they decide to destroy it.

So they pour water on the stone,

and then they light a fire underneath it.

When the water gets hot, it turns to steam,

and the steam expands,

and effectively blows the stone to pieces.

The Moabite Stone fragments

are then hidden among the members of the local tribe,

and Charles spends three years trying to find them.

Initially he's able to find 38 pieces,

and then eventually another 19

are either recovered or donated.

And then utilizing the squeeze as reference,

he begins to painstakingly reassemble the shattered stone.

In 1873, it makes its debut at the Louvre.

It's an absolute sensation.

People flock to get a personal look

at this real-world piece of biblical history.

And the story of how it was discovered,

destroyed and pieced back together again,

only adds to the mystique of this relic.

Over 2,000 miles away,

another hidden box holds proof

of a different kind of worshiped figure.

In 1827, an English soldier

named James Lewis is posted with the army in Agra, India.

He fakes his own death and deserts the army,

a crime, by the way, which is punishable by death.

He then changes his name to Charles Masson,

and for the next few years, goes adventuring

and seeks fame and fortune

in places like India and the Middle East.

Charles, as he's known, is quite the character.

During his travels he assumes several identities.

He poses as a monk,

as a Frenchman, as a haji, as a healer,

all the while developing a keen eye for ancient artifacts.

In 1833, the British East India Company hires him

to explore and document ancient sites

in what's now Afghanistan.

Charles arrives in the Gandhara Valley,

and he sees there a series of ruined, domed buildings.

And he goes in to explore them,

he is hoping to find some ancient coins

that might have some value.

But instead he finds a round soapstone box with a lid.

Charles opens the container, and discovers pearls,

and coral and sapphire beads, all burnt.

And at the center of the container,

he finds an intricate gold cylinder,

adorned with carvings and rubies.

The gold cylinder is a reliquary, or casket,

which would traditionally hold sacred offerings

and physical remains of a holy person.

This reliquary doesn't contain any human remains.

Instead it's carved with a series of eight human figures,

and Charles recognizes one of them as the Buddha.

We typically associate Afghanistan with Islam.

But early trade routes actually brought Buddhism to the area

around the fourth century BC,

about 1,000 years before the arrival of Islam.

While Charles thinks he's uncovered a treasure

nearly 2,000 years old, it takes another 50 years

before the true significance of his discovery

is fully understood.

In the late 19th century,

Western scholars start to take more of an interest

in Buddhism and its teachings in Gandhara.

They soon realized that the image of Buddha

that Charles saw on the casket

was the earliest depiction of Buddha ever found.

Today, statues and images

of the human figure of the Buddha are common.

But before the first century AD,

the Buddha was typically depicted with symbolic images

like footprints, the lotus flower, or an empty throne.

On this reliquary, the Buddha is clothed in a robe

and holds up his hand in a mudra position.

The amazing find becomes known

as the Bimaran Casket,

and it goes on display at the British Museum in 1900.

Yet the story behind it,

and the man who brought it to light,

is almost as extraordinary as the relic itself.

While there's no doubt that Charles

was a colorful character and a skillful liar,

it's undeniable that he's also responsible

for one of the most important Buddhist discoveries

of all time.

The old city of Jerusalem

is known for its rich religious history.

One small stone box found there

contains a stunning link to the past,

one dating back to the time of Jesus.

It's early 1976 in the old city of Jerusalem.

A 25-year-old engineer named Oded Golan

is looking through items in an antiquities market,

when his eye is drawn to a limestone box.

The dealer tells him

that it comes from a nearby neighborhood called Silwan,

but he doesn't know anything else about it,

other than the fact that it is an ossuary, or a bone box.

Ossuaries were very common in the first century AD.

People would be buried for about a year,

and then their bodies would be exhumed

and their bones would be placed in a limestone box.

It was a way of dealing with space issues,

if you didn't have enough room for burials.

They were often elaborately decorated,

sometimes the name of the person

or a phrase was inscribed on the side.

The box that Golan discovers

is relatively unremarkable,

but on the front of it there is some script

in a language that he doesn't recognize.

He likes collecting antiques,

the dealer isn't asking very much,

so he buys the box for about $200

and puts it on a shelf in his parent's house.

The box sits untouched for 26 years.

Then in 2001, Golan meets an ancient language expert

named Andre Lemaire at a dinner party

and asks for help deciphering the inscription on the box.

Lemaire is amazed.

It's written in Aramaic, and it says on it,

"James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."

Names like Jesus and Joseph were common at the time,

as was James.

On the other hand, ossuaries don't normally list the names

of siblings of the deceased,

so it may be that this Jesus

had to have been pretty important

to be name checked on his brother's bone box.

That name-drop raises eyebrows,

along with questions about Jesus's family ties.

In the Bible,

we do know there was a figure named James the Just,

who was said to be Jesus's brother

and he was a leader after Jesus's death,

of the first generation of Jesus's followers.

We also know James the Just was martyred,

he was stoned to death very violently around the year 62 AD.

If authentic, this would make the James ossuary

the earliest written reference

and very first physical piece of evidence

connected to Jesus ever found in Jerusalem.

Golan allows Lemaire to borrow the box

to check its authenticity.

Lemaire first examines the style of the script,

which he dates to around 60 or 70 AD.

This just happens to correlate historically

with when James actually died.

Then he takes bits of limestone flecks

from the surface of the box,

and he has them sent away to the geological survey of Israel

in order to get tested.

They determine that the script

could not have been carved with modern tools,

and they also say that the aged patina of the stone

could not have been forged.

Lemaire publishes his findings

and then begins a press tour

to publicize this amazing discovery.

Even with all the evidence,

there's no definitive proof

of whose remains the box once held,

leading the Israel Antiquities Authority

and others to question its authenticity.

Today, Golan loans it to museums around the world,

where visitors can get an up-close look

at what might be an artifact of Jesus's life.

They say history can be stranger than fiction,

which is the case

with what one young fisherman pulls from the sea in 2013.

August 16th, 2013.

A young Palestinian fisherman named Judah Ghurab

takes his small boat out into the waters

off the coast of Gaza.

He's looking in the shallow waters for fish.

As he's looking down from his boat,

he sees a dark figure maybe 15 feet down.

It looks like a man, so he's startled at first,

but then curiosity gets the better of him

and he jumps out of his boat and dives down,

and what he finds is there's a large statue down there,

half buried in the sand.

It's dark metal with hints of green and gold

and Judah wonders if he's found something valuable.

But it's too heavy for him to lift by himself.

Judah heads back to land,

gathers up some friends and family and they head back out

and they try to bring the statue to the surface

by tying around it a clothesline.

For four arduous hours,

they take turns diving down to the bottom,

yanking on the clothesline,

dragging the statue across the seafloor

until they finally reach the shore.

They're able to heave the statue onto a donkey cart,

and take it to Judah's house for closer inspection.

The statue is a six-foot-tall naked man,

with dark curly hair.

Judah thinks it's made of gold and that he's hit pay dirt.

And then about a month later,

the statue makes a surprise appearance on eBay.

It includes a few blurry photos of the statue

laying on a bed in a child's bedroom, with smurf sheets.

Even by eBay standards, this is a strange listing.

Bidding opens at a mere $500,000.

The post and asking price gets the attention

of Gaza archaeologist Fadel Al-Utol,

who identifies the statue

as an incredibly well-preserved bronze

of the Greco-Roman god, Apollo.

One of the 12 Olympians, Apollo is a son of Zeus,

and he's the god of archery, music, truth and healing.

He's also considered to be one of the most beautiful gods,

and this statue does him justice.

Al-Utol is amazed

by how beautifully well preserved this statue is.

He estimates it weighs more than half a ton.

Given its purported size, condition and rarity,

this Apollo of Gaza

could fetch anywhere between $20 and $45 million dollars.

Unfortunately, before Al-Utol

can examine the statue in person,

the Gaza authorities swoop in.

Immediately, police arrive to the statue's location

and haul it away.

Soon after in 2023, war breaks out in the region,

and news about the Apollo statue all but disappears.

Whatever the fate of this particular statue,

there is still the hope of other very similar discoveries,

because we know that this statue

was actually made from a cast.

And so maybe there were other copies

that were made at the same time.

Maybe they're still out there,

whether under the water or on land,

just waiting to be discovered.

A long lost papal palace, a statue of a Greek god,

fragments of a priceless text,

these are just some of the divine discoveries

that give us new insight into the past.

I'm Danny Trejo, thanks for watching Mysteries Unearthed.