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Reuters
The coins buried in the jar are 24-carat gold and weigh 845g (30oz)
Young people volunteering at an archeological dig in central Israel have found 425 gold coins 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 weighed 845g (30 oz) and would have been worth a huge sum when buried – enough to buy a luxury home in one of the caliphate’s cities.
Who owned the cache, and why she never came back to collect it, is a mystery.
“The person who buried this treasure 1,100 years ago had expected him to pick it up, and even secured the ship with a nail so that it would not move,” said the director of the excavation, Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad of the Israelites Antiquities Authority, said in a statement.
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EPA
Volunteer Oz Cohen said the coins first looked like very thin leaves when he discovered them
She added: “Finding gold coins, certainly in such an important quantity, is extremely rare. We find them almost never in archaeological excavations, seeing that gold has always been extremely valuable, smelted and used from generation to generation.”
The youth who discovered the herd, Oz Cohen, said, “It was amazing. I dug into the ground and when I dug the ground, it saw what was seen from very thin leaves. When I dug up I saw that these were gold coins. “
Robert Kool, a coin expert, said the cache consisted of whole gold dinars, but also 270 small gold pieces – pieces of dinars cut to serve as “small changes”.
He added that one of the pieces was a fragment of a golden solidus of the Byzantine emperor Theophilos who minted in Constantinople, which was a rare material proof of the continuous connections between the two rival empires during this period.
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