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 ...
LOL
Heh... of course, it’s not unlikely that the coins were buried by a Jew living under muzzie domination.
:^)
BTW< total quibble, and totally irrelevant, Indy's swap of a bag of sand for a solid gold idol would not, of course, work, that much gold would be quite heavy. I remember that one from a Danny Dunn book I read as a kid.
What a find!
Oh God I *loved* Danny Dunn! And Encyclopedia Brown.
Searching in your own couch doesn’t seem effective, in my experience!
They found a cache of cash!
Hey, cheer up, he may have pocketed a few of 'em.
It's a huge sum of money NOWADAYS!...........$57,450 at current gold prices...............
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