Teenage volunteers unearth 1,100-year-old gold coins in Israel

Israeli teenagers volunteering at an archaeological dig have unearthed hundreds of gold coins which had lain buried for more than a thousand years.

The cache consists of 425 coins, weighing 845g – enough to buy a luxurious house in one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods at the time, according to Israel’s Antiquities Authority.

The young volunteers were helping out at an excavation site in the country’s central region, where a new neighbourhood is planned to be built, when they made the discovery.

The 24-carat pieces date back to the early Islamic period when the area was part of the Abbasid Caliphate, which controlled most of the Near East and north Africa.

The treasure’s original owner, and why they buried it, remains a mystery.

"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,” said excavation director Liat Nadav-Ziv.

“We can only guess what prevented him from returning to collect this treasure.”

Workshops covered the area at the time the treasure was hidden, she said.

Oz Cohen, one of the volunteers who uncovered the hoard said: "It was amazing. I dug in the ground and when I excavated the soil, saw what looked like very thin leaves. When I looked again I saw these were gold coins.”

Robert Kool, a coin expert at the Antiquities Authority explained that it would have been a significant amount of cash at the time.

"For example, 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," he said.

The discovery, which was made on August 18, is among the largest caches of ancient coins ever found in Israel.

In 2015, amateur divers found around 2,000 gold coins off the coast of the ancient port city of Caesarea dating to the Fatimid period in the 10th and 11th centuries.

"Hopefully the study of the hoard will tell us more about a period of which we still know very little," Mr Kool said.

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