30 Treasures That Are Long Lost To History But There’s A Slim Chance Of Them Reappearing

The word treasure means different things to different people; for some, it’s their beloved spouse, for others, their lego collection. But today we’re focusing on actual treasures – items of great cultural, historical, and more times than not, monetary value that, unfortunately, were lost.

Talking about how big of a loss the disappearance of significant items is for humankind, associate professor of history at Southern Utah University, Dave Lunt, noted that there isn’t a price one can put on that. “Sometimes, things are preserved just by accident, but more often they have been curated and saved because they carry great significance. Of course, some of that significance might be monetary—gold and silver and jewels, for instance—but it's hard to overstate the role of cultural significance,” he told Bored Panda in a recent interview.

“The things a culture or society chooses to preserve tells us a lot about that society. So, of course when we lose the artefacts or memorabilia, we lose those messages about the society that preserved them.”

Despite having happened hundreds of years ago, some stories of lost treasures intrigue people to this day. For some reason, many of us find the unsolved mystery fascinating, which, according to Lunt, might be related to our need to find explanations or rationale.

“I think the quest for order is a key driver of a lot of our actions, today and historically. Looking for explanations in a world that often defies rationality is a good reason to wonder about ‘unsolved mysteries’. They probably weren't mysteries to the people of the past. There are so many gaps in our knowledge that we puzzle over things that might have been mundane or ordinary to them.

“I also think there is a tendency to think that we today are much more intelligent and accomplished compared with people of the past,” the expert continued. “Of course, in some ways we have access to much greater tools than ancient people did. On the other hand, the more I study the ancient world, the more I am impressed with their knowledge and achievement. People of the past were just as smart and resourceful and motivated as people of the present.”

Lunt continued to point out that dismissing earlier people's abilities with fantastical explanations is not just a modern phenomenon. “When ancient Greeks in the Classical era looked at the huge fortification walls at a place like Mycenae, built hundreds of years earlier during the Bronze Age, they figured that only a huge Cyclops could have built something so big (they're still called Cyclopean Walls today). In the 1960s, Erich von Däniken published a book that suggested that aliens had visited earth in ancient times and were responsible for ancient technology and achievements. In the end, of course, this is quite unlikely, but the prejudice shows forth - how could ancient people be as smart as us? Well, maybe we aren't as special as we would like to think.”

Asked about favorite mysterious treasure stories, the associate professor of history jokingly admitted being a “full-fledged nerd”, so the ancient "treasures" he would love to see discovered would be lost texts. “Things like lost literary works: the Iliupersis, or the Aethiopis are epic stories, like the Iliad and Odyssey but treating other parts of the Trojan War; I would love to read [them], as well as the poetry of Sappho, which survives in mostly fragmentary form.”

The expert suggested that for people who’d love to see treasures of something more palpable, like gold and silver, something like the tomb of Alexander the Great would be a sight to see.

“I live in Utah, in the western United States. Here, there are old local legends from the 1800s that the Aztecs hid their gold in the canyons of Utah when the Spanish arrived in Mexico (the area I live in was part of Mexico until the 1840s). So, I think there are always stories of ‘lost treasure’ if we look around,” Lunt added.

It’s safe to assume that there isn’t a period in time that didn’t see at least one treasure, no matter how big or small, mysteriously disappear. The Current Modern Era is unlikely to be an exception, either. But what would be considered a treasure hundreds of years after 2025?

“That is a great question,” Lunt noted, before delving deeper into what modern-day items could become treasures of great significance in the future. “Of course, there is a lot of gold and silver and beautiful valuable stuff out there, but I think the intellectual or artistic achievements are the things most worth preserving. I think the general default is something like artwork, which can be very expensive and embodies and encapsulates some of the values of our era. But there must be additional things.”

“When I study the past, I often wish we had more of the ‘ordinary’ things from ancient times and places, rather than merely magnificent literary or artistic works,” Lunt continued. “So, what are the ‘ordinary’ things today that will tell future people what we valued, what we were like?

“Perhaps the inexpensive art hanging on the walls of our homes, or the everyday technology of an iPhone, or a well-worn pair of blue jeans will tell future historians much more about humanity in the year 2025 than something like the Mona Lisa (which was painted in the early 1500s). A vinyl record of Taylor Swift might be the most important thing from the 2020s to survive the next two thousand years,” the expert shared, adding that he was kidding… but not completely kidding.

“The impermanence of digital records is something that should cause us all to pause a bit. How many of us have saved something to a floppy disk and can no longer access that information? How many times have we tried to open a computer file, only to learn that it has been ‘corrupted’ and no longer readable? We have more information available to us than any people who ever lived, but keeping it accessible is a challenge for archivists and librarians not so dissimilar from ancient librarians who tried to prevent books and scrolls from decaying.”