(Newswire.net— August 29, 2020) — A young volunteer helping out at an archeological site in central Israel found 425 gold coins that are more than 1,000 years old, BBC reports.
Most of the coins found are from the early Islamic period when the region was part of the Abbasid Caliphate.
The coins weigh 845 grams and at the time they were buried they were worth a real fortune – enough to buy a luxurious house in one of the cities of the caliphate.
Who buried them and why they never returned for the coins remains a mystery.
According to the directors of the excavations Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago certainly expected to return for it.
“He even secured the vessel with a nail so that it would not move,” the directors said in a statement.
As they say, it is a very rare case to find gold coins, especially in such a large quantity.
“We almost never find them in archaeological excavations, given that gold has always been extremely valuable, melted down and reused from generation to generation,” say the directors.
Oz Cohen, a volunteer who discovered the gold, said it was “amazing.”
He explained that he was digging and when he excavated the soil in that area he noticed something that looked like “very thin leaves,” he says.
“When I looked again I saw these were gold coins,” he added.
Robert Cool, a coin expert, says that the treasure consists of gold coins, but also 270 small gold pieces – parts that served as “change”.
He points out that one of those pieces was actually part of a golden statue of the Byzantine emperor Theophilos, forged in Constantinople.
Cool points out that this is a rare material find that proves that there was a connection between the two rival empires in that period.