Golden Treasure Hoard

May 12, 2015

The treasure discovered in the Caesarea National Park harbor The largest treasure of gold coins ever discovered in Israel was found on the seabed in the ancient harbor in Caesarea National Park, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.

A group of divers from the local diving club in the harbor reported the find to the IAA whose officials then went with the divers to the location with a metal detector and uncovered almost 2,000 gold coins dating from the Fatimid period (eleventh century).  

Kobi Sharvit, director of the Marine Archaeology Unit of the IAA said that nearby there is probably a shipwreck of an official Fatimid treasury boat which probably was on its way to the central government in Cairo after collecting taxes. 

The IAA reported that the earliest coin exposed in the treasure is a quarter dinar minted in Palermo, Sicily in the second half of the ninth century. Most of the discovered coins belong to the Fatimid caliphs Al-Ḥākim (AD 996–1021) and his son Al-Ẓāhir (AD 1021–1036), and were minted in Egypt and North Africa.

Scuba diver with
a handful of coins Robert Cole, an expert on numismatics with the IAA said the coins are in an excellent state of preservation, and despite the fact they were at the bottom of the sea for about a thousand years, being gold they did not require any cleaning or conservation intervention from the metallurgical laboratory. “Several of the coins were found to be bent and exhibit teeth and bite marks, evidence they were ‘physically’ inspected by their owners or the merchants,” Cole said.

The Fatimid kingdom was extremely rich and its wealth was legendary. The treasury at the time reported there were twelve million gold dinars in the capital’s coffers in al-Qahira (today’s Cairo). The rise of the Fatimid dynasty to power in the second half of the tenth century and its political and economic policies brought renewed growth to the maritime trade in the eastern Mediterranean basin.

Source: Excerpt of article by Edgar Asher, Ashernet

Photo Credit: Ashernet