École Biblique

In 1909 the aristocratic Englishman Montague Parker came to Jerusalem to locate the treasure of Solomon’s Temple, said to have been buried during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian siege of the city. Parker’s Finnish colleague, Valter H. Juvelius (in the photo, which is often misidentified as a rare photo of Parker), claimed to have discovered a coded passage in the Book of Ezekiel that gave the precise location of the long-lost treasure. Juvelius believed that the outlet to a secret passage leading to the Temple treasure might be located in the area of Warren’s excavations. Guided by a Danish clairvoyant and joined by several engineers who had recently completed work on the London subway, Parker failed to uncover any treasures. But the careful maps and plans executed by Louis-Hugues Vincent, an authority on Jerusalem archaeology from the French École Biblique, remain valuable today.