Robert Kool, a coin expert with the IAA, said the coins date to the end of the 9th century when the region came under the control of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, a dynasty that ruled territory from present-day Algeria to Afghanistan. . The coins – a total of 425 – were made of pure 24-karat gold and weighed 845 grams (1.86 pounds).
“With such a sum, a person could buy a luxury home in one of the best neighborhoods in Fustat, the enormously wealthy capital of Egypt in those days,” Kool said.
The hall contained pieces of gold dinars that were cut to use as a small change. Credit: Robert Kool / Israel Antiquities Authority
The teenagers, who had served in pre-military national service, initially thought they had found some very thin leaves buried in a jar.
“It was amazing. I dug into the ground and when I dug out the bottom, I saw what looked like very thin leaves,” Oz Cohen, one of the young men who found the coins, said in a statement.
“When I looked again I saw that these were gold coins. It was really exciting to find such a special and ancient treasure.”
Finding such a large cache of gold coins is very rare, said the directors of the excavation site, because gold was often smelted and reused by later civilizations.
“The coins, made of pure gold that do not oxidize in the air, were found in excellent condition, as buried the day before. Their findings may indicate that international trade took place between the inhabitants of the area and remote areas,” said Liat Nadav- Ziv and Elie Haddad of the IAA.
“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. We can only guess what prevented him from returning to this to collect treasure, “she added.
The gold coin collection includes full gold dinars, but also smaller pieces of gold coins – used as a small change, Kool said.
One of the pieces is an extremely rare piece, he added, showing a fragment of the Byzantine emperor Theophilos, which is said to have been in the capital of the neighboring empire of Constantinople.
Kool said the fragment of a Christian emperor found in an Islamic coinage speaks to the connections between the empires, both in times of war and peace.
In 2016, a walker found a 2,000-year-old gold coin with the face of a Roman emperor in eastern Galilee. The coin is so rare that only one other such example is known to exist, experts at the time said.
And in 2015, divers found a trove of nearly 2,000 gold coins in the ancient Mediterranean port of Caesarea, which had been lost at the bottom of the sea for nearly 1,000 years.
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