Take stock of the world's 6 most famous missing treasures, countless explorers want to find them even if they lose their lives.
1. The Ark of the Covenant
According to the Hebrew Bible, Moses had an ornate gilded wooden chest, known as the Ark of the Covenant, which was built according to God's own design. Its purpose was to protect the holy relics, including two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant for 40 years drifting in the wilderness, and later placed it in the temple of King Solomon in Jerusalem. In 607 BC, the Babylonians besieged the capital of Israel, slaughtering more than a million people and expelling survivors. When the Israelites returned, the Ark of the Covenant, along with many other priceless treasures, was gone. It is not known whether the Ark of the Covenant was hidden somewhere before the siege or destroyed by the Babylonian invaders. In any case, it has not been found so far.
2. The Treasure of Montezuma
When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, in 1519, Emperor Montezuma II greeted him and his men with a grand ceremony. The Aztecs even offered gold and silver to Hernán Cortés in the hope that these white-skinned "gods" would leave Tenochtitlan safely. But the Spanish conquistadors were clearly not satisfied with this, and they put Montezuma under house arrest and began to loot the city and intimidate its inhabitants with the help of local allies. After a brutal massacre, the Aztecs resisted, and Montezuma was killed in the confusion. The Spanish army was eventually defeated by the full force of the Aztec attack, and was forced to dump all its plundered wealth in the waters of Lake Tescoco, and then fled Tenochtitlan. Although Cortés returned the following year with a reconstructed army and conquered the Aztecs forever, the "treasure of Montezuma" was never found. According to the most popular theory, the treasure still exists at the bottom of Lake Tescoco, although countless people have searched there for hundreds of years without success. There are also some legends handed down from Aztec descendants that the Aztecs retrieved the treasure and brought them (along with Montezuma's body) to the north, where they have since been hidden in southern Utah.
3. Blackbeard's Treasure
The most famous pirate in history, Edward Titch, served as an English privateer during the War of the Spanish Succession in the early 18th century and then began his short but notorious career as a pirate. From 1716 to 1718, Blackbeard and his 40-gun flagship, Queen Anne's Revenge, wandered around the West Indies and the Atlantic coast of North America to plunder ships laden with gold, silver, and other treasures from Mexico and South America returning to Spain. In late 1718, the British Navy led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard succeeded in killing Blackbeard in a fierce battle; Maynard beheaded the notorious pirate and hung his head on the bow mast. Before his death, Blackbeard claimed to have hidden a huge treasure, but he never told anyone where it was. Since then, treasure hunters have been searching for it, from the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia to the Caribbean and cayman islands, but without any clues.
4. Treasures of Lima
In 1820, as the army of revolutionary leader José de San Martín advanced into Lima, Peru, the Spanish authorities were anxious to transfer the wealth accumulated since the conquest of the Inca Empire in the 16th century. They commissioned British captain William Thompson to hide the treasure in his ship and sail until it was safe to return to Lima. But Thompson and his crew killed the Spanish governor's guards and took the treasure with them. However, in the end the Spaniards took control of Thompson's ship, and all the crew members were executed except For Thompson and his first officer, who promised to reveal where they had buried the treasure. But when they reached Cocos Island, near what is now Costa Rica, Thompson and his companions fled into the jungle and were never heard from again. Since then, more than 300 expeditions have tried to find the treasures of Lima, but all have failed. The missing cargo reportedly included life-size set gemstones and pure gold images of the Virgin Mary, worth more than $200 million.
5. The Treasure of Mosby
In early March 1863, Colonel John Singleton Mosby, a Confederate Ranger, and his partisans defeated more than 40 Union troops in Fairfax without a single stroke. Mosby reportedly took a sack from the residence of Confederate General Edwin Stoughton filled with more than $350,000 worth of gold, silver, jewelry, candlesticks and other heirlooms, all stolen from the home of a wealthy Virginia plantation owner. When Mosby transports Stouton and other prisoners back to the Confederate line, his scouts inform him that there is a large detachment of Confederate soldiers nearby. In the unlikely event of war, the treasure could be taken away, so Mosby buried a bag of treasure between two large pine trees, which he marked with a knife. Mosby retreated to the back of the Confederate line, but when he sent seven men down to retrieve their wealth, they were arrested and hanged by the guerrillas, and the treasure was subsequently gone.
6. Nazi gold in Lake Toplitz, Austria
In the final months of World War II, when Germany found itself on the brink of defeat, the Nazi regime sought to hide the precious wealth it had plundered from the war over the past six years, transporting up to 300 tons of gold and other treasures hidden in Lake Toplitz, located in Austria's dense alpine forests, where Nazi officers believed to have sunk billions of dollars worth of Imperial Bank gold, but so far none have been found. For half a century, at least seven people lost their lives in the icy waters of the lake in search of lost Nazi gold.