They found a 2,000-year-old Roman tombstone in their backyard. Then the FBI showed up.

Here’s what you’ll learn as you read this story:

• A nearly 2,000-year-old tombstone of a Roman sailor was found in the backyard of a New Orleans home.

• The Latin inscription on the grave marker prompted a search for the marble stone’s origin story.

• Buzz about the find on the local news led to how the old piece crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

This is a collaboration with the story Biography.com.

The discovery of a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman sailor’s tomb wasn’t so much an excavation as a backyard cleanup at a New Orleans home.

When Daniela Santoro and her husband, Aaron Lorenz, began clearing brush in their backyard, they discovered a marble slab with a Latin inscription carved into it. In a strange turn of events, the slab turned out to be the grave marker of a Roman military sailor originally housed in an Italian museum. How it ended up 5,250 miles away is quite the journey.

Santoro, a Tulane University anthropologist and owner of a historic house on Cambron Street in New Orleans’ Carrollton neighborhood, initially thought the slab might be from the city’s historic cemetery when she found it. He is a professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans. Contacted Ryan Gray.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it all,” Gray wrote on the website of the Conservation Resource Center in New Orleans. “There are always surprises and new mysteries to solve.”

Those new mysteries don’t often come with international conspiracies that involve World War II, gardening, and the FBI.

Since there was no cemetery nearby, Gray sought help from a colleague at Innsbruck University and scholars from Tulane to decipher the Latin. They independently concluded that the stone depicted a Roman funerary inscription for a sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus.

An inscription from the 2nd century AD reads: “To the souls who died for Sextus Congenius Verus, soldiers of the Praetorian fleet Misenensis from the tribe of Besi. [of Thrace](who) lived 42 years (and) served 22 in the army, in a trireme [warship] Asclepius Atilius Carus and Vettius Longinus, his successors, made (it) for him, well deserved.”

More shocking: this inscription was already known in the world of anthropology. “In fact, the exact description of the stone was missing from the museum in the city of Civitavecchia, Italy, where it was originally found,” Gray said. “It was surprising, and it changed the scope of our inquiry.”

After the backyard search and identification, the FBI’s Art Crime Squad got involved, picked up the one-foot-wide stone and kept it in custody while the repatriation process began to return the grave marker to its original home.

Getting the stone back to an Italian museum was one thing, but figuring out how it got to New Orleans was another.

Gray began researching the house’s owners from the 20th century, when the house remained in the same family until much of the 1900s. Thanks to the US Census, Gray concluded that Frank Simon bought the house for his family in 1909 while he was working for a wholesale shoe company. Her daughters, working as seamstresses, later own the house. But those facts provide no clue as to how the stone was moved from Italy to Louisiana.

In that dead-end place, Gray meets a next-door neighbor, a US Navy veteran who served in World War II. He was also a non-starter, showing that he was deployed to the Pacific and was never deployed to Italy.

Susan Lusnia, associate professor of classical studies at Tulane, is exploring Italy, where she is already planning a summer research stint. He met with staff and curators at the city’s museum and learned the original site of the headstone, located northwest of Rome, which was a major port for the Roman Empire and remained a port until the 20th century.^th century Allied bombing in 1943 and 1944 targeted the city during World War II and the museum was destroyed and the collections lost.

Lusnia discovered that the marker was probably lost in the chaos after the war and confirmed 34^th The United States Fifth Army Division marched through the city after liberating Rome, the only remaining units in the area. At that point, Gray thought there must be a connection between World War II soldiers and the slabs, but he had no way of sifting through so many names.

That’s when crowdsourcing was done. After local news picked up the story, a previous homeowner on the Cambron Street site heard about the mysterious headstone and immediately made the connection, remembering placing a stone in the garden two decades ago when planting a tree at his new home.

“I just thought it was a piece of art,” said Erin Scott O’Brien Protection in print. “I didn’t know it was a 2,000-year-old relic.”

O’Brien’s grandfather, Charles Paddock Jr., served in the U.S. Army during World War II, stationed for a time in Italy. He returned to New Orleans in 1946 with his new wife, Adele, whom he had met in Italy. Charles taught at Loyola University and the tablet in question sat in a cabinet in his Bachich Street home. But after both grandparents passed away in the 1980s, O’Brien didn’t know its significance. She finished what she thought was a decorative piece and added to the back deck two decades ago.

“I was really wondering if we had a list of potential people through which this could end up here,” Gray said. “I didn’t expect to actually find a real person, so it’s very exciting to know how it ended up here.”

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