The Lost Throne(106)

“Like a huge treasure?”

“Exactly.”

“Also,” Jones cracked, “you probably shouldn’t look for things that have already been discovered.”

“That is a very good point.”

Payne tweaked his search criteria for Italy a few different ways and found nothing of interest. So he decided to move on to the next region on his list.

He typed “ancient thrones + russia” and scanned the results.

At first glance, Saint Petersburg seemed to have more thrones per square mile than any other place on earth. The Winter Palace, which was part of the Hermitage Museum that Ivan Borodin once worked for, had multiple thrones—including the Great Throne Room, where the emperor and empress used to receive their guests. There was also a different throne at the Peterhof and a few more in locations near Nevsky Prospekt that Payne had seen during the past day.

But they weren’t looking for thrones that were on display.

They were searching for thrones that hadn’t been found.





55




Payne moved the computer into the kitchen so he could eat dinner and search for ancient thrones at the same time. Halfway through a three-course meal that consisted of cabbage salad, meat soup, and broiled fish, Payne shifted his focus to Greece.

Despite his limited knowledge of Heinrich Schliemann, Payne knew the German had spent most of his time looking for Greek treasures. This was reinforced by a simple Internet search. Whether Payne was reading about a new exhibit in Athens or an ancient site in the Peloponnese, Schliemann’s name always seemed to get mentioned. Some of the articles praised him; others despised him. Yet there was no denying he’d had a major impact on modern-day archaeology.

With too many articles to choose from, Payne changed the parameters of his search. Instead of looking through long sections of text, he clicked the image-only option on his search program. A few seconds later, his screen was flooded with pictures of Ancient Greece.

“Much better,” he said to himself.

He carefully scrolled through the images, looking for anything that resembled a throne. He paid more attention to paintings and sketches than he did to photographs. His rationale was simple. If an artifact had been photographed, it had already been discovered. Unfortunately, most of the artwork he saw depicted scenes from Greek mythology and the gods of Mount Olympus. He recognized many of their names in the captions—Apollo, Poseidon, Athena, Hermes, Aphrodite, and Zeus—but assumed these ancient deities would play no role in his current search.

His opinion changed a few minutes later.

Ironically, it wasn’t a colorful painting that caught his eye, rather a photograph of an antique coin that made him think of America. Minted by Elis, an ancient district on the western coast of Greece, it depicted the profile of a bearded man who looked strangely similar to the image of Abraham Lincoln on the American penny. Payne admired the precise details of the face—the swirls of his beard, the curve of his cheekbone, and the shadows near his nose—and wondered if the U.S. Treasury had based their design on this two-thousand-year-old coin.

His curiosity piqued, Payne clicked on the link and was redirected to another website. The moment the page opened, his eyes widened in surprise. Two images filled the screen. The same picture as before, plus a different one showing the back of the coin. In it, the bearded man was now seated on an elaborate throne. He clutched a scepter in his left hand and held a winged female in his right. She was roughly one-sixth of his size.

Underneath the photograph, the caption read:Statue of Zeus at Olympia

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World





Payne moved his cursor over the text and realized there was another link, one that would take him to a detailed description of the statue. Suddenly, the coin didn’t matter. Only the statue did.

With the click of a button, details filled the screen.

The Statue of Zeus was made by Phidias, a famous Greek sculptor whose art adorned the Parthenon, in 432 B.C. The chryselephantine statue—it was made of wood and overlaid with gold and ivory—had been housed in a massive stone temple at Olympia, the site of the original Olympic Games. Though Zeus was seated, the statue stood forty feet tall and filled the width of the great hall in which it was placed. His robe, sandals, and scepter were made of gold. An olive crown was sculpted on his head. The throne itself was made of cedarwood and ornamented with ivory, gold, and precious stones. To put its original value into perspective, a first-century historian had compared its worth to three hundred warships.

As a graduate of the Naval Academy, Payne was staggered by that amount. He knew how important warships had been to ancient cultures and realized that if a single statue cost that much to build, then its modern-day value would be immeasurable. Simply put, it was the type of discovery that would have put Heinrich Schliemann or Richard Byrd on the front page of every newspaper around the globe. After all, it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.