Amazing Find Near the Dead Sea [ Petra Drachma coins, Bar Kochba revolt ]

Netscape.com ^ | August 2010 | unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

When Israeli archaeologists began excavating caves near the Dead Sea, they found a real treasure: nine rare silver coins that are believed to date back to a failed Jewish rebellion against the Romans in the second century A.D... archaeological finds relating to the three-year rebellion are rare, and these coins help tell the story of the families that Shimon Bar Kochba led into the caves of the Judean Desert at the end of the second Jewish uprising against the Romans to escape brutal repression -- a move that resulted in their exile... Only 2,000 such coins are known to exist, so finding nine more is considered a great treasure. One of the nine coins is particularly rare. Called the Petra Drachma, it is a half-ounce of silver and is the largest Jewish coin ever issued... one side of the coin shows Jerusalem's second Jewish temple, destroyed by the Romans during the first Jewish rebellion in the year 70. The other side shows another important Jewish symbol, the image of four plants, known as the four species, used during ceremonies for the festival of Sukkot. "Bar Kochba never minted his own coins, so what we have here is a Roman coin with the temple and the four species stamped over the portrait of the Roman emperor," Hanan Eshel, who led the digs and is the head of the Jewish Studies and Archaeology Department at Tel Aviv's Bar Ilan University, explained... "It appears the people first hid their money before fleeing to caves farther in." The monetary value of the coins was high enough to buy a house. He assumes the money was abandoned in the cave because it was useless in the barren desert.

[SunkenCiv]

Dunno, see if someone can find it.

The restamping of existing coins was routinely done, typically when someone fell out of favor, or in situations like this. The Emperor Tiberius had a johnny-do-it-all, Aelius Sejanus (played by Patrick Stewart in the BBC production “I, Claudius”) who wound up implicated in a coup plot, arrested, and strangled in his prison cell (not stabbed as shown in the series).

He’d previously been permitted to mint his own coins, and might very well have become T’s legal successor. Anyway, only twelve of Sejanus’ coins are known to have survived, the rest were reminted or otherwise recycled.