ANCIENT CULTURES / AMERICAN HISTORY "Here is both a fascinating chronicle of one of history's greatest treasure stories and a paradigm-shattering tale of a pre-columbian expedition to the New World. No one interested in the real story of America's prehistory can afford to ignore this book." --Steven Sora, author of Secret Societies of America's Elite In 1982 Russell E. Burrows, a treasure hunter in southern Illinois, stumbled on a hidden cave and its cache of ancient gold sarcophagi and statues, gold medallions, and weapons. There were also hundreds of black "portrait stones," inscribed with various symbols and letters and the profiles of Roman soldiers, ancient Jews, early Christians, and West Africans. Researching more than 7,000 artifacts removed from the cave before it was sealed--and gathering the opinions of a number of experts in archeology, the history and languages of ancient cultures, and geology--Frank Joseph pieces together how these objects came to be buried in the middle of the United States. Almost 2,000 years ago Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra, ruled the semi-independent Roman province of Mauretania, in present-day Morocco, with her husband, King Juba II. Following the execution of their son, Ptolemy, by Emperor Caligula, the Mauretanians rebelled against their Roman overlords. The Roman legions attacked, pushing them down the west coast of Africa in retreat. To escape, the Mauretanians constructed a fleet of ships with the help of West Africans for a transatlantic voyage to a land where they hoped to safely rebuild their kingdom. Taking with them two great prizes--Cleopatra's golden treasure and King Juba's encyclopedic library of ancient wisdom--and using the maps and navigational knowledge of their ancestors, they sailed past the Canary Islands, following the same route that Columbus was later to take on his famous voyage of discovery. Illustrated with over a hundred photographs of artifacts retrieved from the southern Illinois site, The Lost Treasure of King Juba is a compelling story that could force us to rethink the early history of our nation and the possibility that Africans landed on our continent nearly fifteen centuries before Columbus. FRANK JOSEPH is the editor-in-chief of Ancient American magazine and the author of The Destruction of Atlantis and Synchronicity and You. He lives in Colfax, Wisconsin.