Introduction

The bust of Ozymandias (the Greek name for Ramesses II) that inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem. Look on my works, ye mighty!

Chapter One: Lost Graves

Alexander the Great’s generals fought for control over his corpse after he died, knowing it was a potent symbol that could legitimize their rule.

Ptolemy (known in history as Ptolemy I) stole Alexander’s body during a funeral procession and brought it to Egypt.

Giovanni d’Athanasi, nicknamed Yanni, discovered the Tomb of Nebamun.

Giovanni Belzoni, the former circus strongman turned Egyptologist.

The famous pharaoh and heretic Akhenaten (left) and his wife Queen Nefertiti. Akhenaten often portrayed his body in strange ways in art.

Burkhan Khaldun, or God Mountain, where Genghis Khan was allegedly buried.

The Darkhad, a tribe who guards Burkhan Khaldun and keeps visitors away.

Edward IV, the kind of England whose death opened the door for Richard III to take over.

Henry VII, the usurper to the English throne.

Bosworth Field, where Richard III’s army clashed with the army of Henry VII.

A bust based on the skull of Richard III. His champion Philippa Langley grins next to it.

The coffin for Richard III during his internment ceremony.

Chapter Two: Lost Cities

Heinrich Schliemann as a young man.

The Trojan Horse, known only from the lost poems of the Epic Cycle.

Frank Calvert, the hapless wannabe archaeologist whose family owned the land on which Troy was ultimately found.

The many layers of Troy as a modern archaeological site.

Troy as it might have looked like in its heyday.

Muziris, an Indian port where the Romans sent vast amounts of gold in exchange for spices.

Wilhelm Dörpfeld, the archaeologist who sorted through Schielmann’s mess after he discovered Troy.

Schliemann’s mausoleum in Athens.

Chapter Three: Lost People

James and Arlette Mellaart when young.

Mellaart at Çatalhöyük.

The Dorak treasures that Mellaart had two artists draw. These were published in the Illustrated London News.

More Dorak pictures from the Illustrated London News.

Mellaart’s sketch of the throne fragments with hieroglyphs.

Mellaart’s sketch of a pendant.

Mellaart’s sketch of a Dorak dagger.

Near 217 Kazim Dirik Street in İzmir.

The letter that Anna Papastrati sent to Mellaart.

Examples of Yortan pottery.

Sketch of a relief from a temple in Egypt showing the invasion of the Sea Peoples.

Aydin Dikmen, the drummer and artifact forger who knew Mellaart.

Nazi eagle brooches. The top left one is real. The others are fake.

James and Arlette Mellaart in old age.

Mellaart’s son Alan walks through his old man’s hoards of collected papers.

Alan and a scholar going through some of James Mellaart’s papers.

Chapter 4: Lost Relics

Abu al-Majd (left), who found the jars with the Nag Hammadi codices. Umm Ahmad (right), mother of the men who found them.

Muhammad Ali, who took control of the Nag Hammadi codices.

The beaten-up leather cover of one codex.

The antiquity shop where the scholar first realized the value of the codices.

Jesus’s rival, Apollonius of Tyana.

A rendering of the First Jewish Temple.

A rendering of the Second Jewish Temple.

Herod the Great, who built the Second Temple.

Vespasian, the general sent it to put down the Jewish revolt.

Titus, Vespasian’s son, whose troops destroyed the Temple.

Valentinian, the emperor who raped his friend’s wife and set in motion the change of events that led to the Temple relics being stolen.

Procopius, the scholar who recorded most of what we know about the Temple relics’ whereabouts.

Eliezer Sukenik, the savvy scholar who acquired several early Dead Sea Scrolls.

Montagu Brownslow Parker, the reckless British earl who excavated beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Bérenger Saunière, the crooked priest rumored to have secured the gold from the Temple treasuries.

Chapter 5: Lost Bones

Franz Weidenreich, who received the “Where is Nellie?” postcard, and later tried to sneak the Peking Man bones out of China.

Otto Zdansky, who uncovered the first hints of Peking Man in the form of teeth.

The upper cave at Longgushan (a.k.a., Dragon Bone Hill).

Various researchers who studied Peking Man, including Davidson Black (second from the right) and Wenzhong Pei (far left).

Henry Houghton, whose scorn of the Peking Man fossils doomed them.

Marines at Camp Holcomb in China.

Fossil teeth recovered from Dragon Bone Hill in later years, long after the disappearance of the Peking Man bones.

Former marine Richard Bowen likely saw the buried Peking Man bones. His tip led anthropologists to investigate the old Camp Holcomb. (You can watch an interview with Bowen here.)

Camp Holcomb today. No one knows whether the bones are still buried, or whether they’ve been destroyed.

Chapter 6: Lost Civilizations

The ancient Indus Valley Civilization city of Mohenjo-Daro.

The British archaeologist John Marshall and his family. Marshall managed British archaeology in India during the period in which the Indus Valley Civilization was discovered.

Daya Ram Sahni, the Indian archaeologist who uncovered the first Indus Valley Civilization site, albeit without appreciating what he’d found.

An Indus Valley Civilization seal with a man in a yoga pose (mulabandhasana).

The 2016 Bollywood epic Mohenjo Daro stirred up controversy for its portrayal of a Hinduized Indus Valley Civilization.

Scientists have discovered wholly unknown cities in the Amazon using a technology known as LIDAR.

Chapter 7: Lost Languages

Arthur Evans, the grand old man of British archaeology, who strove and failed to decipher Linear B.

The sprawling palace of Knossos on Crete, which likely inspired the myth of the Labyrinth.

The Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy V, the subject of the Rosetta Stone.

Antoine de Sacy, who connected the cartouches on Egyptian hieroglyphs to Chinese writing.

Thomas Young made a strong initial foray into deciphering hieroglyphs but ultimately fell far short.

Coptic, the Egyptian church language that helped Jean-François Champollion decipher hieroglyphs.

George Smith, the engraver who helped decipher a form of cuneiform, then stripped off some clothing and began running about the British Museum.

Alice Kober, who did important work deciphering Linear B before her death.

Yuri Knorozov (and his Siamese cat Asya), a Russian linguist who did pioneering work deciphering Mayan glyphs.

The enigmatic Phaistos disc, which will likely never be deciphered.

Chapter 8: Lost Knowledge

Ancient Alexandria, at the time of Roman rule.

The legendary Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The Alexandrian general Achillas murdering Pompey.

Imagined reconstruction of the Library of Alexandria.

Imagined reconstruction of the fire at the Library of Alexandria.

When British troops invaded Washington D.C. during the War of 1812, they burned much of the city, including the Library of Congress.

The carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum are still readable with CT scans and artificial intelligence.

Chapter 9: Lost Gold

The full European map featuring Mansa Musa in the bottom right.

First mate James Alexander Forbes, who helped steal and hide the Treasure of Lima but never returned for it.

Emperor Hirohito founded Kin No Yuri—the Golden Lily—before World War II to steal gold from nations across Asia.

Prince Chichibu, Hirohito’s brother, who ran the Golden Lilly project.

Tomoyuki Yamashita, the general who was in charge of hiding Japanese gold in the Philippines.

Locksmith Rogelio Roxas discovered this golden Buddha in the mountains in the Philippines.

Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, who wrote the most important book on the Japanese plunder of gold during World War II.

Chapter 10: Lost Art

Andrea del Verrocchio, who tutored the young Leonardo da Vinci.

Ludovico Sforza, the duke of Milan who commissioned Leonardo’s doomed horse statue.

Two pages from Leonardos’ notebooks.

The Mona Lisa was copied dozens of times by other artists in centuries past.

Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet friend of Picasso’s who was arrested and roughed up in connection with the Mona Lisa theft.

The idols that Picasso had paid a friend to steal from the Louvre.

Picasso based two faces in his legendary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon on the stolen idols.

Curator Alfredo Geri helped broker the return of the Mona Lisa.

No painting in history has been stolen as often as the Ghent Altarpiece—seven times.

During its evacuation from the Louvre before World War II, the oversized Raft of Medusa got tangled in electrical wires and nearly fried.

There was no more ticklish piece to evacuate from the Louvre than the delicate Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Chapter 11: Lost Loot

The Prussian monarch, Frederick Wilhelm, despised the Amber Room and gave the panels away to a Russian tsar.

The Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, the initial home of the Amber Room.

Catherine the Great moved the Amber Room south to her palace in Pushkin.

The Catherine Palace in Pushkin.

Adolf Hitler gazes at his planned Führermuseum, which he envisioned would house all the looted art in Europe.

Anatoly Kuchumov, a curator at the Catherine Palace, failed to hide the Amber Room panels from Nazi invaders.

Alfred Rohde tried desperately to hide the Amber Room panels somewhere in Germany during the Soviet invasion.

Soviet archaeologist Alexander Brusov led the initial search for the Amber Room panels after World War II.

Chapter 12: Lost Technology

A diving suit similar to the one the Greek sponge-divers would have worn while recovering underwater treasures off Antikythera.

The Antikythera Youth was the most famous piece of art recovered from the shipwreck.

Derek de Solla Price did pioneering work on understanding the Antikythera Mechanism.

Another mechanism built by Hero of Alexandria, in this case a god clubbing a dragon.

This whirligig device, run on steam, could have served as an early steam engine had anyone thought to harness it.

Blacksmith Lewis Temple invented the most effective toggling iron in the history of whaling.

A Temple toggling iron.

One of the three supposedly lost technologies from the NPR show that turned out to be not so lost. In this case, a Roman corvus.

Another not-so-lost technology, a ferrite jukebox core.

A third not-lost technology, a radium suppository.

Chapter 13: Lost Species

Majorie Courtenay-Latimer and a coelacanth in a composite picture.

A coelacanth at the museum in New London.

James Leonard Brierley Smith poses with the second coelacanth, which took him years to track down.

The ivory-billed woodpecker Sonny Boy mugs for the camera.

An ivory-billed woodpecker nest in the Singer Tract.

John James Audubon’s ivory-billed woodpecker painting.

The marsupial “dog,” the thylacine, died out in the 1930s, but sightings continue today in Tasmania.

Scientists thought the Black-naped Pheasant Pigeon went extinct in the 1890s, until one wandered by a camera trap in Papua New Guinea in 2022.

The remains of the Oxford dodo, the only soft dodo tissue in existence.