Rediscovered Treasures Quiz

Answer: Young Bedouin shepherds. While looking for a stray goat, a young Bedouin shepherd is said to have thrown a stone into a cave and heard a jar shatter. Between 1947 and 1956, eleven caves at Qumran yielded fragments of some 900 manuscripts, including the oldest known copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible, nearly a thousand years older than any previously known.

Answer: 5,300 years ago. Erika and Helmut Simon, German hikers, found him in the Ötztal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. Ötzi lived around 3300 BC: he is Europe's oldest natural mummy, complete with clothes, copper axe and tattoos. In 2001 an X-ray revealed an arrowhead in his shoulder: he was murdered. He is on display in Bolzano, Italy.

Answer: French soldiers' fortification work. During Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign, soldiers were strengthening a fort near Rosetta (Rashid). Officer Pierre-François-Xavier Bouchard grasped the importance of this stele bearing the same decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. It enabled Champollion to decipher hieroglyphs in 1822. Handed over to the British in 1801, it has been in the British Museum since 1802.

Answer: Torcs. A torc is a rigid, open neck-ring, a status symbol among the Celts. Ploughing brought up the first ones in 1948, and further deposits were found up to 1990: more than 150 torcs in all. The 'Great Torc' of Snettisham, from the 1st century BC, weighs over a kilo of gold and silver.

Answer: The victim of a recent murder. The face was so well preserved that they called the police. The man had in fact died about 2,400 years earlier, with a leather noose around his neck: probably a sacrifice. In acidic, oxygen-free peat, skin tans instead of rotting. He is displayed in Silkeborg, Denmark.

Answer: An amateur diver. Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome on holiday, was diving at about 8 m when he thought he saw a corpse's arm sticking out of the sand. They were two Greek bronze warriors from the 5th century BC, each about 2 m tall. A rarity: most ancient bronzes were melted down for their metal. They are displayed at the museum in Reggio Calabria.

Answer: Inspecting two sunken nuclear submarines. The US Navy agreed to fund his underwater robot on condition that he first inspect the wrecks of the nuclear submarines Thresher and Scorpion. With the time left over, and teamed with Frenchman Jean-Louis Michel (Ifremer), he found the Titanic on 1 September 1985, nearly 3,800 m down, broken in two.

Answer: The Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Schliemann smuggled the treasure out of the Ottoman Empire and had his wife Sophia photographed wearing the 'jewels of Helen'. Given to Berlin, it vanished in 1945, taken by the Red Army, and only resurfaced in Moscow in 1993. The irony: these objects are about a thousand years older than the supposed date of the Trojan War.

Answer: Her right hand. French vice-consul Charles Champoiseau found the statue in 1863, in many pieces; the base shaped like a ship's prow followed in 1879. In 1950 an American team found the right hand, now displayed in a case near the statue in the Louvre. The head has never been found.

Answer: Baron Edmond de Rothschild. In a villa buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, excavators found 109 pieces of silverware hidden in the vat of a wine press. Taken out of Italy, the hoard was bought by Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who gave it to the Louvre the same year. Among the pieces: cups decorated with skeletons, an invitation to enjoy life.