Thousand-year-old gold coins found in Jerusalem’s Old City

While the Antiquities Authority was conducting archaeological excavations as part of the plan to build the elevator last month, inspector Yevgenia Kapil discovered a juglet.

By HANNAH BROWN
Thousand-year-old gold coins found in Jerusalem’s Old City (photo credit: DAFNA GAZIT/ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY)
Thousand-year-old gold coins found in Jerusalem’s Old City
(photo credit: DAFNA GAZIT/ISRAEL ANTIQUITIES AUTHORITY)
Putting in an elevator can be a lot of work, but there was a silver lining – or in this case, a gold one – when the Jewish Quarter Development Corporation started building an elevator to make the Western Wall Plaza more accessible to visitors.
While the Antiquities Authority (IAA) was conducting archaeological excavations as part of the plan to build the elevator last month, IAA inspector Yevgenia Kapil discovered a juglet (small pottery jar). Some weeks later, as excavation director David Gellman was examining the finds, he emptied the contents of the juglet and found four pure gold coins dating to the Early Islamic period, more than a thousand years ago.
“To my great surprise, along with the soil, four shiny gold coins fell into my hand. This is the first time in my career as an archaeologist that I have discovered gold, and it is tremendously exciting,” said Gellman.
According to IAA’s coin expert Dr. Robert Kool, “The coins were in excellent preservation and were immediately identifiable even without cleaning. The coins date from a relatively brief period, from the late 940s to the 970s CE. 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 Shi’ite rivals – the Fatimid dynasty of North Africa, who conquered Egypt, Syria and Eretz Israel in those years,” he said.
“The profile of the coins found in the juglet are a near-perfect reflection of the historical events,” Kool said. “Two gold dinars were minted in Ramla during the rule of Caliph al-Muti‛ (946–974 CE) and his regional governor, Abu ‛Ali al-Qasim ibn al-Ihshid Unujur (946–961 CE). The other two gold coins were minted in Cairo by the Fatimid rulers al-Mu‘izz (953–975 CE) and his successor, al-‘Aziz (975–996 CE).”
Kool noted that this was a rare find. “This is the first time in 50 years that a gold cache from the Fatimid period has been discovered in Jerusalem’s Old City. In the large-scale excavations directed by Prof. Benjamin Mazar after the Six Day War, not far from the current discovery, five-coin and jewelry hoards from this period were uncovered south of the Temple Mount.”
While four modern-day coins may not add up to much, “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 laborer,” he said.
“Compared with those people, the small handful of wealthy officials and merchants in the city earned huge salaries and amassed vast wealth,” Kool said. “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.”
Herzl Ben Ari, director of the Jewish Quarter Development Corporation – who happened to visit the excavation site when the coins were exposed – said that, “although we are used to archaeological discoveries once in a while, it is always very exciting to uncover Jerusalem’s unique and turbulent past. Once the elevator project is complete, we intend to allow the public to view large numbers of the archaeological finds.”


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