The box found buried at the site of Nelson's Pillar on O'Connell Street, Dublin, which was believed to contain a time capsule, is empty.
Staff at the National Museum, where the stone and metal box was taken after it was found earlier this month, had been gently "chipping" away at it for a number of weeks until it was opened, the museum's director, Dr Pat Wallace, said yesterday. He confirmed there was nothing inside, which intrigued him. "We hoped until the end there would be something in it."
A metal plaque on the box, believed to be part of the foundation stone for Nelson's pillar, carried a long eulogy to the "transcendent and heroic" deeds of Admiral Nelson, who died in the Battle of Trafalgar three years before work on the pillar began.
It also records the laying of the foundation stone by the Duke of Richmond on February 15th, 1808, and mentions other city dignitaries and subscribers, including the then lord mayor James Vance, members of the La Touche family and Arthur Guinness.
The plaque covered a recess, which was filled with a distilled pine resin called rosin - a preservative. Dr Wallace had believed this contained coins from the early 1800s, based on a history of Dublin by Warburton, Whitelaw and Walsh, written shortly after the Nelson monument was built.
"Now the question is was it robbed or why did they make a recess that was never used?" he asked.
Dr Wallace said the museum would have to examine all newspaper and other references of the day to the placing of coins under the pillar's foundation stone.
"If we were to go on present evidence, it very much looks like the coins were stolen when the rosin was poured into the recess," he said. "The story isn't finished as far as I'm concerned."
Three coins - a penny, a ha'penny and a farthing dating from 1805 and 1806 - were found when the pillar was blown up in 1966 and are in private ownership. "We would like to track them down now," he said.
The box was found on October 2nd by archaeologists working alongside a team excavating a site in preparation for the erection of the Millennium Spire, or Monument of Light, on O'Connell Street.
The metal plate from the box will go on display at the Collins Barracks branch of the National Museum in two weeks.