A 2000-year-old temple of the Indiana Jones civilization was found off the coast of Italy. Photo

A 2000-year-old temple that was deliberately destroyed was found off the coast of Italy near Naples. Researchers found ancient altars and marble slabs with inscriptions.

According to archaeologists, the temple was created by Arab immigrants from the Nabataean culture. This is an ancient kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula whose rock-carved "Treasury" is featured in the cult movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, LiveScience writes.

"For me, it was one of the most unexpected discoveries," said Michele Stefanile, the first author of the study, a maritime archaeologist from the Southern Higher School of the Educational Institute in Naples.

The temple is located off the coast of Pozzuoli, a town in the Campi Flegrei volcano, about 16 kilometers east of Naples. In Roman times, the city was known as Puteoli, a large harbor where ships from all over the Roman world docked to deliver various goods.

Volcanic activity over the centuries has significantly altered the coastline of Pozzuoli, submerging about 2 km of Roman-era warehouses and other buildings associated with the ancient port area. Artifacts found in the sea back in the 18th century indicated that there was a temple here, but no one knew where exactly.

In 2023, researchers mapping the region's seabed discovered two submerged rooms with Roman-style walls. Against the wall of one room were two white marble altars that contained several rectangular niches that probably once held sacred stones. Each of the rooms also had a marble slab with the Latin inscription "Dusari sacrum," meaning "dedicated to Dusari," the main god of the ancient Nabataean religion.

"It seems that we have a building dedicated to the Nabataean gods, but with Roman architecture and Latin inscriptions," said Michele Stefanile.

Historically, the Nabataean kingdom stretched from northern Arabia to the eastern Mediterranean. In the fourth and second centuries BCE, the Nabataeans controlled a growing network of trade in luxury goods such as frankincense, gold, ivory, and perfume, amassing vast wealth by the end of the first century CE. A huge tomb, often called the Treasury in the Nabataean capital Petra, was built around that time.

"The Nabataeans were in Puteoli as a community of traders. And they brought their religious practices here," said Steven Tuck, a Roman historian at Miami University in Ohio who was not involved in the study.

Stefanile and her team found that the temple was deliberately buried in the second century AD with a mixture of concrete and broken pottery.

"It is likely that after Trajan's conquest of Arabia in 106 AD, the Nabataeans were no longer able to trade freely in Puteoli, and they may have abandoned the harbor," Stefanile said. And their temple was destroyed.

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