Ten Famous Relics and What Science Says About Them

A linen cloth about 14 feet 5 inches long (4.4 meters) carries the faint front and back image of a man who appears to bear the wounds of crucifixion. When Secondo Pia photographed it in 1898, he found the image read more clearly as a photographic negative, a discovery that has fueled debate ever since.

The cloth's documented history begins in the 1350s at Lirey, France, in a church founded by the knight Geoffroi de Charny. Around 1389 the local bishop, Pierre d'Arcis, wrote that it was a painting and that the artist had confessed. The House of Savoy acquired it in 1453, it survived a fire at Chambery in 1532, and it has been in Turin since 1578. The Holy See has owned it since 1983.

In April 1988 a strip was cut from one corner and divided among labs in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich. Their results, published in Nature in February 1989, put the linen between 1260 and 1390 with 95 percent confidence. Critics have since argued that the corner held a medieval repair, or that the raw data are statistically uneven. Textile conservator Mechthild Flury-Lemberg found no sign of invisible reweaving, and later checks of leftover sample found little contamination. Recent popes have avoided ruling on authenticity and treat the cloth as an object of devotion.

Of all the cups proposed as the Holy Grail, the one in Valencia Cathedral has the strongest claim to being genuinely ancient. Its bowl is a small dish of polished dark red agate, about 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) across. The gold stem, handles and jeweled base were added in the Middle Ages.

Professor Antonio Beltran, who studied the cup in the 20th century, placed the agate bowl in an eastern Mediterranean workshop, perhaps in Egypt, Syria or Palestine, sometime between the last centuries BC and the 1st century AD. Tradition says Saint Peter carried the cup to Rome and that Saint Lawrence sent it to Spain in the 3rd century. The documented trail starts in the Middle Ages. In 1399 the monks of San Juan de la Pena gave it to King Martin I of Aragon, and in 1437 King Alfonso V handed it to the cathedral as security for loans. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both used it at Mass in Valencia.

Rivals have fared worse. The Sacro Catino in Genoa, once called an emerald, turned out to be glass. The silver Antioch Chalice at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now thought by museum specialists to have been a 6th-century standing lamp.

The Gospel of John says soldiers threw dice for Jesus's seamless tunic rather than tear it. At least two European churches say they hold it, and a third tradition places it under the cathedral at Mtskheta in Georgia.

Trier Cathedral in Germany has the best known claim. Its history is documented from 1196, when the archbishop placed the robe in a new altar, and it was first shown publicly in 1512 at the demand of Emperor Maximilian I. Its rare exhibitions draw huge crowds; more than a million pilgrims and visitors came in 1996. Science has little to work with here. Over the centuries the robe was patched with silk and taffeta, and in the 19th century it was soaked in a rubber solution to stabilize it. The few original fragments left are not considered suitable for carbon dating.

The rival tunic at Argenteuil, near Paris, is first documented in 1156, and tradition says Charlemagne received it around the year 800. During the French Revolution a priest cut it into pieces to save it. Samples were radiocarbon dated in the early 2000s, and two labs returned ranges of roughly AD 530 to 650 and AD 670 to 880. Supporters argue that centuries of damage could have skewed the results.

Every summer, Kandy's Esala Perahera sends drummers, dancers and richly dressed elephants through the city in honor of a single tooth. Buddhist tradition holds that it is a tooth of the Buddha, carried from the kingdom of Kalinga in India by Princess Hemamali and Prince Dantha during the reign of King Sirimeghavanna in the 4th century.

For centuries, possession of the relic was tied to the right to rule, so kings kept it close to their palaces. The temple in Kandy was first built in 1603, and the city was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1988. The complex was damaged in a 1998 bombing by the Tamil Tigers and later repaired. The tooth itself rests inside a series of nested golden caskets, and visitors normally see only the outer reliquary.

The relic's history includes a famous clash of claims. In 1560 a Portuguese expedition seized a tooth in the north of the island and took it to Goa, where the viceroy, Constantino de Braganza, refused a large ransom offer from the King of Pegu (in today's Myanmar) and had it destroyed. Sri Lankan tradition holds that the genuine relic was never captured and remained safe on the island. No independent physical analysis of the Kandy tooth has been made public.

In the old private apartments of the Ottoman sultans at Topkapi Palace, a reciter reads the Quran aloud around the clock beside some of the most revered objects in Islam. The collection, known in Turkish as the Sacred Trusts, includes a mantle, swords, a seal and hairs from the beard attributed to the Prophet Muhammad.

Most of these relics came to Istanbul after Sultan Selim I conquered Egypt in 1517. According to Ottoman accounts, the mantle had been kept by the Abbasid caliphs in Cairo, and the last of them, al-Mutawakkil III, passed it to Selim. Tradition traces it further back to the poet Ka'b ibn Zuhayr, who is said to have received it from the Prophet after reciting a poem in his praise. Verses from that celebrated poem, the Burda, decorate the chamber walls.

The mantle was the center of palace ritual. On the 15th day of Ramadan, the sultan and his court came to honor it. The Quran recitation was paused for roughly half a century after Turkey became a republic, then revived after 1969 and continues under the state religious affairs directorate. As with many relics, the case for the mantle rests on a chain of custody, not on laboratory study, and no scientific analysis of it has been published.

The Hebrew Bible describes the Ark as a gold-covered wooden chest holding the tablets of the Law, kept in the innermost room of Solomon's Temple. It vanishes from the record around the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC, and ancient Jewish sources offer competing accounts of its fate.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church says the Ark is in a chapel beside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum. Its account comes from the Kebra Nagast, a royal chronicle that says Menelik, son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark to Ethiopia. Historians such as Richard Pankhurst date the surviving text to the 14th century AD. The current chapel was built in the 1950s under Emperor Haile Selassie.

Access is the whole story. A single monk, chosen for life, guards the chapel and never leaves its grounds, and he is the only person permitted to see what it holds. Even the head of the Ethiopian church says he cannot. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church keeps a tabot, a consecrated replica of the tablets, and these are carried through the streets during the Timkat festival each January. Paul Raffaele, reporting for Smithsonian magazine in 2007, was not allowed to see it.

Before he became Santa Claus, Nicholas was a 4th-century bishop of Myra, in what is now Turkey, traditionally said to have died around AD 343. In 1087 sailors from Bari, Italy, carried his remains off from Myra, and most of them now lie in the crypt of the Basilica di San Nicola. Venice says its own sailors took the leftovers a few years later, and its church on the Lido holds hundreds of small fragments. Some Turkish archaeologists have suggested the thieves took the wrong body.

Researchers have had real bones to work with. When Bari's tomb was opened in 1953 for repairs, anatomist Luigi Martino studied the skeleton and estimated the man stood about 5 feet 6 inches (1.67 meters). He later concluded that the Venice fragments complemented the Bari bones.

In 2017 the Oxford Relics Cluster, led by Tom Higham and Georges Kazan, radiocarbon dated a small piece of pelvis owned by Father Dennis O'Neill of St. Martha of Bethany Church in suburban Chicago. The fragment, traced to Lyon, France, dated to the 4th century, matching the saint's era. Higham noted that many relics his team tests prove later than their stories, which made this one notable. Bari's own bones include the matching upper pelvis, and the team hoped to compare DNA from the collections.