Jerusalem’s Western Wall yields four 1,000-year-old gold coins

Four gold coins were recently found in a pottery jar uncovered during an excavation in West Wall Plaza in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The valuable 1000-year-old coins show the political and historic power change between the two Muslim dynasties that controlled the city at the time.

A little juglet or bottle was discovered about two months ago by inspector Yevgenia Kapil of the Israel Antiquity Authority about two months ago, during preliminary digging as part of a plan by the Jewish Quarter Development Corporation to build an elevator facilitating access to the plaza from the Jewish Quarter.

Last month, archaeologist David Gellman, director of the excavation, emptied out the dirt inside the juglet and discovered four gold coins in excellent condition.

Robert Kool, the antiquities authority’s coin expert, examined them and determined that they dated from the late 940s through 970s C.E., the early Islamist era.

Two of the coins are gold dinars that were minted in Ramle under the rule of the Caliph Al-Muti’ (946-974) and his regional governor, Abu ‛Ali al-Qasim ibn al-Ihshid Unujur (946-961 C.E.).

The other two coins were minted in Cairo by the Fatimid rulers al-Mu‘izz (953-975 C.E.) and his successor, al-‘Aziz (975-996 C.E.).

“The profile of the coins found in the juglet is a near-perfect reflection of the historical events.

This was a time of radical political change, when control over Eretz Israel passed from the Sunni Abbasid caliphate, whose capital was Baghdad, Iraq, into the hands of its Shiite rivals – the Fatimid dynasty of North Africa,” Dr Kool explains.

“Four dinars was a considerable sum of money for most of the population, who lived under difficult conditions at the time.

It was equal to the monthly salary of a minor official, or four months’ salary for a common labourer,” he says, adding that for members of the elite in those days, however, it was a relatively small sum.

“The small handful of wealthy officials and merchants in the city earned huge salaries and amassed vast wealth.

A senior treasury official could earn 7,000 gold dinars a month, and also receive additional incomes from his rural estates amounting to hundreds of thousands of gold dinars a year.” 

Stash of pure, 24-carat gold coins unearthed in Israel

During the summer break, two Israeli teens discovered a cache of hundreds of gold coins dated back 1,100 years. In an archaeological excavation in Yavne in central Israel, the cache, buried in a clay pot, was uncovered by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).

The coins date back to the end of the 9th century when the region was under the control of the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate, a dynasty that controlled the area from modern Algeria to Afghanistan, Robert Kool, a coin specialist with the IAA, said. The coins, 425 in total, were made of pure 24-karat gold and weighed 1,86 pounds (845 grams).

“With such a sum, a person could buy a luxurious house in one of the best neighbourhoods in Fustat, the enormous wealthy capital of Egypt in those days,” said Kool.

The teenagers, who were taking part in pre-military national service, initially thought they had found some very thin leaves buried in a jar.
“It was amazing. I dug in the ground and when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves,” Oz Cohen, one of the youths who found the coins, said in a statement.

Hiker finds the rare gold coin in Israel

“When I looked again I saw 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 exceedingly rare, said the directors of the excavation site, since gold was often melted down and reused by later civilizations.

“The coins, made of pure gold that does not oxidize in air, were found in excellent condition as if buried the day before.

Their finding may indicate that international trade took place between the area’s residents and remote areas,” said Liat Nadav-Ziv and Elie Haddad from the IAA.

“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,” they added.

The collection of gold coins contains full gold dinars, but also smaller cuttings of gold coins — used as small change, said Kool.

One of the cuttings is an exceptionally rare piece, he added, showing a fragment of Byzantine emperor Theophilos, which would have been minted in the neighbouring empire’s capital of Constantinople.

X-rated medieval doodles reveal our ancestors had a sense of humour
Kool said the fragment of a Christian emperor found in an Islamic coin hoard speaks to the connections between the empires, both in times of war and peace.

In 2016, a hiker found a 2,000-year-old gold coin carrying 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 said at the time.

And in 2015, divers found a trove of nearly 2,000 gold coins in the ancient Mediterranean harbour of Caesarea, which had languished at the bottom of the sea for about 1,000 years.

2,000-year-old seal depicting Greek god Apollo found in Jerusalem

Archaeologist Eli Shukron told The Times of Israel that the finding of a rare 2000-year-old signet ring carved with the Greek sun god Apollo provides fresh evidence of a pluralistic Jewry walking the streets of ancient Jerusalem during the Second Temple period.

“It helps us to see a Jerusalem that wasn’t an ultra-Orthodox city of any kind, it was more pluralistic,” said Shukron, who is convinced that the ring must have decorated the finger of a Jew. The fact that a Jew wanted a Greek god’s symbol, “shows the wide variety of practices in Jerusalem. Everyone was a Jew, but there were different groups and perspectives,” he said.

The dark brown jasper gem sealing (intaglio) was recently discovered at the Archaeological Sifting Project at Tzurim Valley National Park during the wet sifting of earth taken from ongoing City of David excavations of the foundations of the Western Wall.

Shukron said there is absolutely no doubt that it is Apollo who is engraved on the tiny, oval-shaped, 13 millimetre-long, 11 millimetre-wide, and 3 millimetre-thick sealing. It would usually have been used as a signature stamp on beeswax to seal contracts, letters, wills, and goods or bundles of money, according to a City of David press release.

The profile of Apollo has long flowing hair spilling over his sturdy neck. He has a large nose, thick lips, and small prominent chin, according to the press release. The styled hair is braided above his forehead, with long curls reaching the shoulder.

All of this adds up to the god Apollo in the eyes of a trained archaeologist. “You cannot miss it,” Shukron said.

The question then arises, what is a nice Jewish neighbourhood such as 1st century CE Jerusalem doing with a pagan Greek god?

According to Shukron, there are already a handful of archaeological artefacts dated to the Second Temple period in which Apollo plays a starring role: Two other Apollo gem sealings were discovered at Masada and another two were found in Jerusalem, one also from the Western Wall drainage tunnels excavations and one in a tomb on Mount Scopus.

Shukron noted that whereas during the Roman period, other members of the Greek and Roman pantheon make appearances, for the centuries surrounding the turn of the Common Era, only Apollo has been found. The god symbolized light, health and general well-being and success — something everyone generally aspires to, he said, which is why the symbol was considered “kosher” for these Second Temple Jews.

“It’s important to see that Jerusalem is more than conservatism, there are people like this who [as evidenced by his adoption of a pagan symbol as his signature] would have had more freedom in their thinking,” said Shukron. What is also clear, through his very public use of the symbol, is that there would have been a group of Jews who accepted this usage as well.

Expert of engraved gems Prof. Shua Amorai-Stark made an assessment of the sealing and noted that “at the end of the Second Temple period, the sun god Apollo was one of the most popular and revered deities in Eastern Mediterranean regions.

Apollo was a god of manifold functions, meanings, and epithets. Among Apollo’s spheres of responsibility, it is likely that association with sun and light (as well as with logic, reason, prophecy, and healing) fascinated some Jews, given that the element of light versus darkness was prominently present in Jewish worldview in those days,” he said.

Amorai-Stark said that this polarization of light versus dark is seen in that the craftsman’s choice of a dark stone layered with yellow-golden and light brown.

“The choice of a dark stone with the yellow colouring of hair suggests that the creator or owner of this intaglio sought to emphasize the dichotomous aspect of light and darkness and/or their connectedness,” he wrote.

Whether the craftsman was going for a cup half empty or half full view of the world in his workmanship on the sealing, for Shukron the fact of its existence and use during the Second Temple period is an anchor between Jews of two millennia ago and today.