They found Fred's stash! ( grin)
Posted on 08/25/2020 1:51:53 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Youths volunteering at an archaeological dig in central Israel have found 425 gold coins that had lain buried in a clay jar for 1,100 years.
Most of the money dates back to the early Islamic period, when the region was part of the Abbasid caliphate.
The coins weigh 845g (30oz) and would have been worth a huge sum when they were buried - enough to buy a luxurious home in one of the caliphate's cities.
Who owned the cache, and why they never returned to collect it, is a mystery.
"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," the directors of the excavation, Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said in a statement...
Robert Kool, a coin expert, said the cache consisted of full gold dinars but also 270 small gold cuttings - pieces of dinars cut to serve as "small change".
He added that one of the cuttings was a fragment of a gold solidus of the Byzantine Emperor Theophilos minted in Constantinople, which was rare material evidence of the continuous connections between the two rival empires during this period.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
“The coins weigh 845g (30oz)...”
It’s worse than you think. 845 g is only a little over 27 ounces of gold, since gold is measured in troy ounces, something this BBC “journalist” doesn’t seem to know. A troy ounce is 31.1 grams, or 1.097 of an avoirdupois ounce.
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~2 grams each (~28 grams per ounce) ...
I have seen paper thin gold coins in museums
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My son will buy a fake (at fake price) if he already has an original of it.
I routinely find silver and foreign coins as I routinely check the coin-star reject slots in grocery stores. People leave all the old stuff behind. The silver gets rejected, I guess it’s not the right weight. The old big dollars get rejected too. Found an Ike once.
It was meant sarcastically. I live in Eastern Pennsylvania, about 10 minutes from the New Jersey border. Unless one of the local indian tribes buried gold, I’ll never find any. I’m usually happy if I find anything from a penny to a quarter.
Lol! Guess I’m not the only one to do that.
I know it was sarcastic. Re NJ area. Try the Vincetown sands or other nearby fossil sites for re ancient “gold” - esp. Belemnitella (internal amber-like remains of a squid-like creature from hundreds of millions of years ago)
Northern Jersey has great minerals. I recall it being Franklin County.
“Gold” is what you like.
They found Fred's stash! ( grin)
I don’t know where $60,000 would buy ANY home.
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Seems like a lot of work for 20-30 bucks a pound.
But then this was 25 years ago that I was doing it, and $20-$30 was worth a lot more back then, so maybe it was worth the effort.
I know a lot of the NICE eBay coins are fakes. Look like they just came off the anvil on a polished flan, not buried for centuries.
Not likely there was a bank paying interest then.
The gold is worth $60,000 now, but the coins substantially more. That amount of gold probably made somewhat fairly rich at that time.It is not the same as $60,000 now.
No, but credit cards were charging 19%. Some things never change.
I want it back!
Not a problem!
Just install one of these flux capacitors in your automobile!
Rich irony that coins from the early Islamic era were found by a bunch of joos . . .
Finders Keepers, not.
This would never happen to me. I’d dig up a tax bill with postage due.
Who owned the cache, and why they never returned to collect it, is a mystery.
One of two reasons. A) they were killed by a sword or B) they got divorced and refused to let the ex-wife get any of his gold. See A) after she found out he hid the gold.
The Roman bronze coins don't typically look very great after 1500 years in the soil. Those the ones that are legit in a lump of concretion. Silver and gold are generally pristine (after careful cleaning) and would only end up that way if they were among the bronzes. The question then becomes, would someone just keep the silver and gold for their skedaddle, and hope to come back for the bronze?
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