[jalisco555]

"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 to AP.

Is that right? I thought I'd read somewhere that Bar Kochba did mint coins. They said "Year 1 of the freedom of Jerusalem", "Year 2 of the freedom of Jerusalem", etc. I'm going from memory here but does anybody know for sure?

[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.