In Search of Solomon’s Lost Treasures, Neil Asher Silberman, Biblical Archaeology Society (6:4), Jul/Aug 1980.

Al Aqsa Mosque

On the morning of April 19, 1911, a crowd of angry Moslems, outraged at what they considered to be a desecration of the holy Mosque of Omar or the Dome of the Rock, rampaged through the streets of Jerusalem, quickly mobbing the entrance to the government citadel. The Turkish governor of the city, fearing for his own life at the hands of the crowd, ordered his troops to quell the disturbance. But the soldiers were unable to control the growing mobs, and by nightfall, rioting and mayhem had spread to all parts of the city.

Never before had an archaeological expedition ended in so violent an uproar. But never before had there been an archaeological expedition quite like Captain Parker’s. Conceived in folly, but planned with cunning, the Parker Mission had come to Jerusalem with a single goal- to locate and unearth the fantastic treasure of Solomon’s Temple buried beneath the Temple Mount.

The origins of the Parker Expedition of 1909–11 are still shrouded in mystery. Tradition has it that an eccentric Swedish “Biblical scholar” and “Master philosopher” named Valter H. Juvelius, while working in a Constantinople library in 1908, accidentally discovered a coded passage in the Book of Ezekiel which described the precise location of the long lost treasure of Solomon’s Temple.

Read the rest of In Search of Solomon’s Lost Treasures in the online Biblical Archaeology Society Library.