Has there ever been a recorded instance of a leader pursuing

>>3226391
During the second punic War, after the string of defeats culminating in Cannae, the Romans sent an expedition to Greek Anatolia to secure the sacred stone of a god named Cybele and to bring it back to Rome as a way to induct the new deity into their pantheon.

Aside from this I can't think of any examples.

>>3226391
Saddam Hussein had a copy of the Necronomicon. It's currently in the hands of ISIS. Why else do they conceal themselves in all black, destroying every ancient religious artifact they can find? Why do their followers spontaneously go mad and shoot up public places?

>>3226391

The Ptolemies stole Alexander the Greats body and entombed it in Alexandria. I don't know if that counts.

File: Xu_Fu_expedition's_for_the_elixir_of_life (1).jpg (113KB, 857x426px) Image search: [Google]

113KB, 857x426px

>>3226391
The search for the "Pills of Immortality" has been an eternal meme among Chinese Emperors.

The Qin Emperor, for example, sent a doomed naval expedition led by led by one of his physicians, Xu Fu, to find the Pills in some mystical island in the Eastern Seas, purportedly on a place called Mount Penglai. Xu Fu led two expeditions and never came back after the second one.

Legends has it that instead of facing the Qin Emperor's wrath, him and his crew settled in either what is today Taiwan, or the Philippines, or Japan. The Japanese made legends and stories of the theory, saying that Fuji was the mystical Mount Penglai, and that Xu Fu settled with the Japanese in order to help them build a civilization.

The Japanese emperors have the "Three Regalia" of mirrror, sword, and Jewel.

Supposedly during the surrender talks at the end of WWII, Hirohito was obsessed with making sure the three regalia were safe, above all else, including the lives of tens of millions of civilians.

What about when those Russians restored some guy's tomb and they won the battle of Stalingrad like the next day?