History
Teenagers Found An Extremely Rare Trove Of 425 Gold Coins From 1,100 Years Ago
A trove of gold coins whose owner failed to retrieve.
A few teenage volunteers who were helping around the excavation site of Yavne, central Israel, have found 24-carat-gold coins that date back to more than a thousand years ago.
To be precise, all 425 coins could be dated back to the Abbasid period around 1,100 years ago. Experts of Israel Antiquities Authorities have said that this is an extremely rare find and included smaller clippings made of gold that may have been denominations of the currency.
This secret stash of gold was inside clay pottery and was unearthed on August 18, 2020. The site was planned to be built into a new neighborhood.
The story of the gold?
Experts have yet identified the owner of the gold coins nor why it was not retrieved back. Excavation director Liat Nadav-Ziv explained, “The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago must have expected to retrieve it and even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move.”
“We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure.”
The area where it was found were filled with workshops during Abbasid period.
One of the teenagers, Oz Cohen, said he felt amazing to have found such a treasure. “I dug in the ground and when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves. When I looked again I saw these were gold coins,” said the boy.
These coins were minted during the Abbasid Caliphate peak based on numismatist Robert Kool’s explanation from Antiquities Authority. The hundreds of coins were also worth a lot of fortune during that time, enough to buy a luxurious estate in one of the most expensive residential areas of Egypt from that time.
Kool added, “Hopefully the study of the hoard will tell us more about a period of which we still know very little.”
Aside from Yavne’s discovery, another notable rare find was 2,000 gold coins found by amateur divers in the 11th-century Fatimid period back in 2015. These were found resting underwater off the coast of Caesarea’s ancient port city.
