Random Important Historical Artifacts That Are Still Missing (14 items)

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  (#2) Blackbeard's Treasure May Still Be Out There

  Edward Teach, AKA Blackbeard, may have tight competition for the title of most famous pirate, but when it comes to pirate lore, his missing treasure is the most well-known piece of lost history. In 1718, Blackbeard and Queen Anne's Revenge supposedly ran aground on a sandbar in North Carolina; no one has ever found the enormous trove of treasure that the ship reportedly carried.

  Since this incident neither rendered the ship unusable - and experts argue if this ship is indeed Queen Anne's Revenge - nor significantly impacted the people aboard it, the crew would have had more than enough time to unload and conceal their haul. As of 2018, there is no definitive find of Blackbeard's purported treasure.
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  (#7) The Third Reich Made The Amber Room Disappear

  Some monarchs use stones and jewels to decorate their crowns and sceptres, but King Frederick I of Prussia took it a step further by having an entire room constructed from his favorite gemstone: amber. The bedazzled Amber Room came about in 1701, then 15 years later, King Frederick William I gifted the room to Peter the Great as a symbol of their newly cemented alliance.

  The room comprised several large, removable panels, which could be transported with ease. However, this advantage quickly turned into a detriment when the Germans began Operation Barbarossa in 1941 and invaded Russia.

  The Third Reich looted countless Russian treasures, including the Amber Room, which they sent to a castle museum in Königsberg, Germany. Some believe offensive strikes destroyed this German castle in 1944, presuming the Amber Room as lost. Rumors persist, however, that perhaps a group deconstructed the Amber Room once again and moved it to a secret location. Others believe the panels were loaded on to a steamer called the SS Karlsruhe for transport to Germany during the war, but Soviet planes took down the ship.

  In 2020, Polish divers discovered the wreck of a ship called the Karlsruhe filled with crates that they believe might hold the amber panels. Tomasz Stachura, leader of the dive team that found the ship, told Live Science that "the possible examination of the load will have to be discussed with the Maritime Office in Gdynia, Poland, and they will make the final decision."
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  (#12) Three-Quarters Of The World's First Feature-Length Film Got Blacklisted From History

  There is a robust list of missing films from cinematic history, but arguably the most historically significant item was The Story of the Kelly Gang­, a 1906 silent motion picture widely recognized as the world's first ever feature-length narrative film.

  The Australian movie told the story of Ned Kelly and his mischievous crew, and it was a smash success despite its apparent runtime being over an hour long. Unfortunately, all records of the film became lost by the mid-1900s. In the decades since its disappearance, some fragments of the film have emerged, which adds up to about 25% of the entire movie; these parts are available for public viewing. The rest of the film remains lost.
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  (#10) An Entire William Shakespeare Play Is Lost To The Annals Of Time

  William Shakespeare isn't simply the most renowned playwright of all time, he's also one of the most prolific. Most of Shakespeare's work has survived centuries and readers can still read his plays today - but the major exception seems to be Cardenio, an apparent full-length play that scholars are only aware of due to bureaucratic records. Some scholars believe the play, sometimes referred to as The History of Cardenio, was based on the story of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote.

  No pages of Cardenio is known to exist today, but some literary historians surmise that a later production, Double Falsehood, is a close adaptation of it.
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  (#4) The Map Used To Plan The Atomic Event At Hiroshima Remains Lost

  The atomic devices dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki altered world history forever, but the map used to plan the first offensive strike is currently gone. The document, titled Map of Target Area 90-30-748, Hiroshima Area, A-2 Section, XXI Bomber Command, is supposed to be in the National Archives, but it disappeared at an unknown date and has never been recovered.

  For posterity's sake, however, a few copies of the map still exist.
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  (#9) The 'Peking Man' Specimen Has Vanished

  In piecing together humanity's evolutionary history, the "Peking Man" specimen - identified in 1927 as a prime example of Homo erectus - was one of the most important clues. Uncovered near Beijing, China, the specimen gained worldwide notoriety when researchers definitively declared it an ancestor of modern humans. However, the Peking Man became lost during WWII.

  With an impending Japanese invasion, Chinese scholars attempted to export the specimen out of China, but no record exists of where it went thereafter.

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