A team of archaeologists and volunteers has unearthed a hoard of 1,100-year-old Islamic gold coins near the city of Yavne in the Central District of Israel.
A hoard of Islamic gold coins dating from the 9th century CE, found near Yavne in Israel. Image credit: Emil Aladjem / Israel Antiquities Authority.
“It is extremely rare to find treasures from the Abbasid period in excavations in Israel — especially gold coins,” said Dr. Robert Kool, a coin expert at the Israel Antiquities Authority.
“This is one of the earliest known caches from this period — end of the 9th century CE — found in the country.”
“During this period, the region was part of the vast Abbasid Caliphate, stretching from Persia in the east to North Africa in the west, and whose center of government was in Baghdad, Iraq.”
“The hoard, deliberately buried in the ground in a clay jar, contained 425 gold coins, most of which date to the Abbasid period,” added Dr. Liat Nadav-Ziv and Dr. Elie Haddad, archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
“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. We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure.”
“The discovery may indicate that international trade took place between the area’s residents and remote areas.”
The total weight of the hoard is about 845 grams of pure gold (24 carats).
“With such a sum, a person could buy a luxurious house in one of the best neighborhoods in Fustat, the enormous wealthy capital of Egypt in those days,” Dr. Kool noted.
The hoard consists of full gold dinars, but also contains about 270 small gold cuttings — pieces of gold dinars cut to serve as small change.
The cutting of gold and silver coins was a regular feature of the monetary system in Islamic countries after the 850s CE, with the sudden disappearance of bronze and copper coins.
One of the cuttings is an exceptional rare piece, never found in excavations in Israel — a fragment of a gold solidus of the Byzantine emperor Theophilos (829-842 CE), minted in Constantinople.
The appearance of this small Byzantine coin fragment in an Islamic coin hoard is rare material evidence of the continuous connections (war, trade) between the two rival empires during this period.
“This rare treasure will certainly be a major contribution to research, as finds from the Abbasid period in Israel are relatively few,” Dr. Kool said.
“Hopefully the study of the hoard will tell us more about a period of which we still know very little.”
