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11TH CENTURY CAESAREA GOLD COIN HOARDArthur Shippee forwarded this Jerusalem Post article about a new find of gold coins in the Israeli town of Caesarea. Thanks. -Editor
A small bronze pot was found a few days ago at the Caesarea National Park, and inside it were 24 gold coins and a gold earring, according to the Antiquities Authority. The cache was found hidden between two stones in the side of a wall, located in a house in a neighborhood that dated from the Abbasid and Fatimid periods (909-1171 CE). The coins are dated to the end of the 11th century, which would link the cache to the Crusader conquest of the city in the year 1101, one of the more critical events in the city’s medieval history. According to the Antiquities Authority, most inhabitants of the city were massacred by Baldwin I’s army between 1100 to 1118 CE. Baldwin I served as the king of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. The authority said it can be presumed that the treasure’s owner and his family likely died in the massacre or were sold into slavery. They would have been unable to return to the site of the cache and retrieve their hidden gold. “The cache is of a unique combination of coins not yet seen in Israel consisting of two types of coins: 18 Fatimid dinars, well known from previous excavations in Caesarea, where it was the standard local currency of the time,” said Dr. Robert Kool, coin expert at the authority. “And a small and extremely rare group of six Byzantine imperial gold coins. Five of the coins are concave and belong to the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071-1079 CE).” Kool said that the coins did not circulate locally and may hint at trade relations between Caesarea and Constantinople during the time. One coin would be equal to a farmer’s annual salary, so whoever owned the cache was likely wealthy or involved in trade, Kool said. To read the complete article, see: Here's an MSN News article with some more images. -Editor   To read the complete article, see: David Pickup forwarded a BBC News story. Thanks. This one shows an investigator using a book to attribute one of the coins. -Editor  To read the complete article, see: There are several more images in this article David forwarded from The Times of Israel. -Editor  To read the complete article, see: Dick Hanscom forwarded this one from the Daily Mail. Thanks. -Editor To read the complete lot description, see: Katie de Silva writes: This one was exciting to me because I worked at Caesarea in the summer of 1978 and we often came upon coins (copper) in our excavations. The site was Herod the Great's capital in Palestine, grew very large in Byzantine times (pop almost 100,000 - huge for the Levant), and there is a crusader fortress still standing on the site. The fort had been converted to a restaurant with an outdoor cabana-type eating area where you could sit in a cooling sea breeze, sipping cocktails watching the sun set over the Mediterranean. I am happy to see excavations are still going on there, and finds are still happening. An incredibly rich site.  Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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