Five members of an Israeli scuba diving club were in for a shock when they stumbled upon a stash of 2,000 ancient gold coin. The divers, Tzvika Feuer, Kobi Tweena, Avivit Fishler, Yoav Lavi and Yoel Miller became inadvertent treasure hunters when they discovered the hoard during an excursion inside the harbour of Caesarea National Park. The group explains that they initially encountered one coin and thought it was a toy token from a game. Intrigued, they recovered several more and showed them to the director of the dive club. The director in turn notified the Marine Archaeology Unit of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the body responsible for overseeing such finds. A second dive was subsequently conducted to uncover the rest of the treasure. The total find was found to weigh in at an impressive 12-13 lbs of gold and is now recognized as the largest collection of gold coins found in Israel to date.
Upon examination, it has been revealed that the collection dates back to the Fatimid period of the 11th century. The IAA says that the coins are diverse, with specimens in dinar, half-dinar and quarter-dinar denominations.
Numasmatist Robert Cole weighed in on this story by saying, “the coins are in an excellent state of preservation. Despite the fact they were at the bottom of the sea for about a thousand years, they did not require any cleaning or conservation intervention from the metallurgical laboratory.”
The IAA hopes that the coins will shed light upon Muslim rule during the era of the Fatimid Islamic Dynasty, the dominating regime of the Middle East during the Classical Islamic Era. No one knows why such a windfall came to be lost but several theories have been voiced. Director of the IAA Marine Archaeology Unit Kobi Sharvit explains, “There is probably a shipwreck there of an official treasury boat which was on its way to the central government in Egypt with taxes that had been collected.”
Other variations of this theory include speculation that the coins were being carried by merchant traders who traded with coastal cities. Regardless of where they came from, the coins are certainly an impressive archaeological find for Israel.
As for the divers themselves, they will be able to claim that they had a hand in discovering the treasures, but the coins themselves are all properties of the country under Israel’s Law of Antiquities. Sharvit calls the loyal divers model citizens with hearts of gold for enabling Israel to access such a valuable historical find.
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